Let's see, four terabytes sounds good.

What?

A thousand dollars?

Yeah, those storage upgrades are going to get you.

But what if we didn't have to?

Well, today I'm pretty excited because I already have the MacBook Pro here.

And the other reason I'm excited is because of this.

Um, I mean, this.

I actually haven't been this excited about an SSD enclosure in a long time.

But there's a good reason why this one is different.

You can tell how excited I am by my face, right?

Oh, what is this?

This is the brand new Thunderbolt 5 enclosure and docking station.

And as far as I'm aware, this is the only one in the world.

Well, not this one, but this model by Acasis.

In fact, it's so brand new that I couldn't even find it on their own website.

Hang on there.

This is Editor Alex.

And I just found out from Acasis that this is going to be launched very soon as a Kickstarter.

Big brands are using Kickstarter now because it's the hip thing to do nowadays.

What I want to find out is if this is the next must-have accessory for the new line of MacBooks that are Thunderbolt 5 capable.

Because I also bought this at the local micro center.

If we can reach advertised speeds or even come close to them, this will essentially eliminate the need to pay the huge Apple tax for storage.

So just a quick recap.

If you're new to Thunderbolt, it's basically a really fast way of moving data around.

It also has charging capabilities through power delivery.

But today we'll focus on the data capabilities only.

Now Thunderbolt 4, the previous generation, has a theoretical limit of 40 gigabits per second.

Now, if you convert that, that's 5000 megabytes per second.

I don't know why they use gigabits, megabytes.

It's confusing.

Just use one thing.

Do you like capital B's or little b's?

Come on.

So if this thing can go faster than 5000, that's already a win in my book.

Now, just so we can get a baseline for comparison, this is what I'm getting on my internal drive.

And that is already pretty insanely fast.

We're getting up to 7300 megabytes in write and about 5900 in read.

This is the 4 terabyte version of the M4 Max MacBook Pro.

And how do those numbers translate?

Well, it's certainly faster than 40 gigabits per second that Thunderbolt 4 is capable of.

In practical terms, we're going to use my old Thunderbolt 4 enclosure.

And I want to do some file transfers just to see what it's like.

By the way, on this Thunderbolt 4 enclosure, I'm getting 2500.

And that seems a little low.

There we go. 2180, 2633.

It's about there.

I'm going to move this 5 gigabyte file, which is part of an LLM, but it's just a blob.

I'm going to move it from my internal drive over to this SSD.

That took a couple of seconds to do.

I will be right up here.

But that's 5 gigabytes, still probably more than most people will be moving.

So this is more than enough power.

When it comes to moving larger files, or let's say you want to use your external drive to actually store your LLMs or build code on your external drives, keep your projects on there, then that's going to have a long term effect on how much time you're going to waste or not waste doing it.

That's why these fast internal drives have been such a hit.

Next, let's transfer this large file image, which is 53 gigabytes and see how long it takes.

One, two, three, go.

So this says less than a minute, and this is the total amount of time that it took.

OK, not too bad, but still kind of noticeable.

After all, we live in a TikTok generation and the YouTube shorts generation.

By the way, I appreciate you all watching this video, even though it's more than one minute long.

Congratulations, you've managed to preserve your attention span.

OK, here we go.

Thunderbolt 5 SSD docking station.

I have not yet plugged this in.

Oh, that is really small.

Wow, that is actually a little bit smaller than my previous favorite Thunderbolt 4 dock.

How do they do that?

This is amazing.

And they fit an SSD enclosure in there, too.

Also, look at this.

This is the right way to do it.

So my old OWC one, still a really good dock, and I've really enjoyed using it over the years.

We got three Thunderbolt 4 ports, and now we have three Thunderbolt 5 ports.

We've got the USB one as well.

The OWC one has one on the front, but otherwise they're very close.

But this I think is going to be a winner.

We'll see.

So far, the specs are better on it.

OWC is not far behind.

They're going to come out with their own as well.

But is it going to have an SSD enclosure?

This is where all the weight comes in.

The power brick.

OWC one weighs 253 grams.

The Acacia's one feels a little heavier. 271, 272.

Pretty close.

This is where all the weight is.

Look at this power brick.

It's insane.

So if you're going to be portable with this thing, you're going to be carrying around the dock, plus this thing and the cable, which together is another 695 grams.

We also need this.

My favorite knife, by the way.

Now, I've got a bunch of NVMe SSDs here, but this is the latest and greatest.

This is the 990 Pro by Samsung.

It's two terabytes.

And according to this, the read speed is up to 7,450 megabytes per second, even beating out the internal drive here.

But that's, that's theoretical, right?

So let's see.

Goes right in there.

And we're going to use this heat dissipating silicone sticker.

Ready to rock.

Hook something like this up.

Make sure you're using the right cable.

Should have a big old five on it like that to signify that it's Thunderbolt 5.

Otherwise, you might not get the speeds, but I have a theory about that.

And I'm making a separate video on Thunderbolt cables.

And here we go.

Allow accessory to connect.

Yes.

All right.

There's my drive.

Now, I wonder if this little gadget can actually handle multiple monitors being plugged into it too.

So let's go with plugging in a monitor here.

Yes, there's one.

Let's try another one.

And there's another one.

Here we go.

That is really cool.

Now, the unfortunate thing is that Macs don't support three displays out of one port.

I got another video on displays coming up.

However, this does.

This came out earlier in 2024 and it has one Thunderbolt 5 port.

That's supposed to support three external displays via one port.

So let's do a quick swaparoo.

I got a full comparison on this Razer 18 as well.

That's coming out on the channel too.

By the way, I want to say thank you to the members of the channel here, because thanks to your support, I'm able to get some of these cool gadgets in here to test.

Also, members get to see videos like this earlier and they get access to separate videos as well.

So I guess this video is kind of sponsored by the members.

Thanks, members.

Got one monitor popped up so far.

Excuse me, it's Windows, so I got to turn off all the ads first.

I'm just kidding.

It's not that bad, but it kind of is.

Okay, I got two.

One more.

Come on.

There we go.

Identify one, two, three, and four.

All these are being powered through one port.

Now, I wonder what kind of heat we've got here.

It's getting pretty warm and toasty.

That's one of the cons of having a Thunderbolt dock together with an enclosure, is because there's going to be so much data going through there.

It's going to get really toasty and hot.

And I wonder how long that SSD is going to last.

I don't have answers for that, but it's something to watch out for.

I'm ready for this test.

First, we're going to start out with Blackmagic Disk Speed.

Let's select it.

Okay.

Okay, come on.

You got to do this.

Oh, almost.

Almost.

Oh, there we go.

The read speed.

The write speed is under 5,000.

But the read speed is over 5,000.

So for the write speed, we are actually a little bit less than the internal.

Not a little bit.

Quite a bit.

But for the read speed, we are pretty much there.

Now, let me disconnect these monitors to see if there's any kind of extra bandwidth benefit we can gain by using only the internal SSD, using this only as an enclosure.

And let's check that out.

Whoa.

Did you see that?

So pluses and minuses here.

Pluses and minuses.

Let me summarize.

There is a certain amount of bandwidth that's available on this Thunderbolt 5 connection going to this gadget.

I'm going to call it a gadget because it's a dock and an SSD enclosure.

You can use it as a really fast SSD enclosure that is faster than anything else available.

And you're getting speeds like this. 6,350 megabytes per second on write.

Way faster than Thunderbolt 4.

And over 5,800 megabytes per second read speed, which is close to what we're getting internally and still much faster than Thunderbolt 4.

But you're able to achieve these write speeds when you're not using the device for display because connecting displays is going to take up extra bandwidth.

And by the way, it's still really impressive and really fast, even with displays connected.

Editor Alex jumping in here.

And I realized that I didn't do a couple of important tests.

I only showed you the internal SSD speeds if they're formatted as APFS.

And this is what it looks like if it's formatted as exFAT.

So it makes it cross-platform compatible.

You can take this between Windows and Macs now, but you lose a little bit of that speed.

Although that read speed is still darn good.

That's one thing.

The other thing is, what about random read and writes?

Sequential tests like this one show you if you're copying large files back and forth.

But if you're copying a lot of really small files, you need a different kind of test.

You need a random speed test.

So here's a different test called the Morpheus DiscMark.

And this has sequential up on top.

Slightly different numbers for your internal drive.

And this is the random speed.

So we're trying to measure up to this.

So I'm going to run this test here as well.

Whoa!

Okay, that's actually faster than the internal one, according to this test.

Tells you another side of the story, right?

What test you run matters a lot.

So make sure when you're comparing read and write speeds, you also know what test was run.

But look at those dubbers.

Wow!

This is crazy because these speeds are actually faster than the internal drive speeds.

Wow!

That's the final result right there.

And it's looking pretty nice, according to this test, at least.

The only downside here is the temperature of this thing after all that testing.

And I'm sure during use, it's going to also hit some of these numbers.

Look at that.

We're hitting over 50 degrees Celsius.

And let me tell you, it's hot.

It's not something you want to be holding unless you like pain.

Yeah, I don't.

So I'm not going to touch that.

It's really hot.

You can see it's hitting 50 degrees, which is, I think, the limit of what's legally allowed.

Certainly, you won't have this in your lap.

But also, I have to question, how long is that SSD going to last with all those temperatures?

You could use Samsung 970 in there, maybe.

Maybe that'll be a little cooler.