Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsFast drive, works great with Thunderbolt 4 hub. Flaky cable sometimes connects at USB 3.1 speeds.
Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2023
Finally a portable SSD with Thunderbolt speeds! It really is three times faster than the USB 3.2 Gen 2 drive from SanDisk I bought just last year (and, for Mac, also three times faster than USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 drives since the Thunderbolt ports on Mac won't use the second lane at all).
At times, plugging it directly into a Thunderbolt 4 port on an M2 Mac mini with the provided cable, it connected using USB 3.1 rather than Thunderbolt. I verified this by looking at the USB and Thunderbolt buses using System Report; also BlackMagic disk speed tests were much slower when this happened (700-800MB/s rather than 2400ish). I'm not sure if that flakiness is caused by the drive, the Mac mini, or the cable—but I'd guess it's the cable. Other times, it connected to the Thunderbolt bus as expected.
Mostly I will have this connected to a Thunderbolt 4 hub that nets me two more Thunderbolt 4 ports. I've found that this setup, with otherwise base M2 but upgraded to 24GB RAM, plus the external TB4 ports and storage, is very cost effective for my needs. Note that there is no decrease in speeds having it connected to the hub vs. directly to the Mac.
Update 1: Because this SSD (the 4TB version) is **both 50% faster and 15 times larger** than the internal SSD on my 256GB M2 Mac Mini, I have turned it into a bootable drive and am running macOS from it. No complaints! Upgrading the Mac Mini at time of purchase to 2TB (half the space!) internally would have cost a whopping $800 extra with Apple's pricing, and I'd have less space. Not to mention it's impossible to upgrade the internal storage after the fact. Setting up as a bootable drive was simple and painless for me. More benefits of the big, fast bootable drive include plenty of space for memory swapping at higher speeds than the internal SSD if I run out of RAM, plus being able to keep large cloud storage drives fully available offline (Apple's FileProvider forces many of them to live in a particular location on the same volume macOS is installed on, which was too small for them until I moved to this drive).
Update 2: If you're looking for a Thunderbolt drive that's a lot faster than this, don't bother looking. Theoretical max data transfer speeds over Thunderbolt 3/4 are limited to something like 22 Gbps (maybe 24 Gbps for Thunderbolt 4?) which translates to 2750MB/sec for Thunderbolt 3. The rest of the 40 Gbps bandwidth of Thunderbolt is reserved for other things. With this drive, I've gotten around 2480MB/sec read and 2400MB/sec write in BlackMagic disk speed benchmarks, which is close enough to top speed that I've stopped looking at, say, external Thunderbolt SSD enclosures + NVMe SSD sticks to try to get faster speeds than this.
