Mac Studio with 4 TB SSD or 1 TB+ External drive for FCPX?

Hi there everyone!

I am currently in the process of buying a Mac Studio with a base 48 core M1 Ultra chip and 64 Gb for FCPX editing for my youtube channels, and I was wondering if I should rather go with a 4 TB internal storage, and work all my library from the inside of the Mac, or if a base 1 TB version, with an external drive (maybe SSD?) could do the trick? The reason for that is that the 4 TB spec is 12 weeks-wait in my country, whereas there is a 1 TB version waiting for me in the refurb right now.

I was wondering about the speeds difference, am I gonna notice it very cleary when using an external storage, or is there any way to make it unnoticeable, maybe using an external SSD?

Thanks a lot for your help !

It depends in what you do and the usual size of your files. If you are going to work with 8K footage or high quality 4K, an external ssd with a usb 3 cable would make it hard to edit; you should look for those that has especial thunderbolt connection. I edited 1080p footage from an SanDisk Extreme Pro, and works great, it advertised to go at 1000 MB/s reading speed but in reality it goes at 700 MB/s because my M1 Mac doesn't support that speed with usb 3, if I try with a thunderbolt ssd it get a minimum of 1200 MB/s enough to work with 4K without trouble. 

If you want to avoid all the trouble go with internal ssd, its going to give you faster reading and writing speeds and you can buy a cheap external drive to save your old projects. Not the cheapest option.

I got into the habit of working from external media a long time ago, so I've been getting machines with 1TB internals.

At the office I've got an 8-bay RAID, and when I WFH I've got a number of SSDs to choose from - all of those are USB 3.1 gen 2, and no SATA internals (they're faster). Need to be especially careful with cable selection though, as cheap cables can drastically impact I/O.

There are some YouTube videos that claim an Acasis SSD enclosure
www.acasis.com/products/acasis-usb4-0-mo...-ssd-universal-tools
With a fast NVME SSD you can get well over 2000 MBps read and write speeds which are close to the internal drive speeds.

See this