Fantom Drives Extreme 1TB External SSD - 2800MB/s, Thunderbolt 3, USB Type-C, Aluminum, 3D NAND TLC, TB3X-2300N1TB

The Thunderbolt/USB-C connection is really super fast on a Mac, very impressed. The drive is very small physically and feels very solid. Highly recommended

This drive changed my life, at least as far as managing photos on my M1 Mac Mini is concerned.I'd long since transferred my Photos library (55K photos, 2.2K videos) to an external USB drive because I didn't have enough storage on my Mac Mini. I hadn't realized that that would actually degrade the performance of my Photos library because of the slow transfer speed of standard USB.I visited an Apple Store and discussed pros and cons of buying a new M2 Mini with more memory and/or more storage, but the "genius" (if they call them that anymore) recommended getting a Thunderbolt SSD for my Photos library.This Fantom drive seemed to offer great performance and capacity for the money, so I bought it and transferred my Photos library, and the rest is history. It's like having a new Mac. And, I got a big enough size that I have plenty of space to fool around with 4K video, etc for a while.It's true I haven't done things like use this "in the field" where I'd put the durability to a test, but I have no regrets about this purchase so far.

Adding this drive to the Thunderbolt 3 port felt like installing another NVME drive in my laptop. It's incredibly fast. Definitely worth the investment.

I've been looking for an external SSD that is reasonably fast when using my M2 Mac Studio. The Mac's internal drive has scorching speeds that hover at 6GB/sec write and 5GB/sec Read with Blackmagic speed tests. The Fantom gives a consistent 2.8 Read and 2.2 write connected directly to a Thunderbolt port or the Caldigit Thunderbolt Hub connected to a Thunderbolt port.This is a huge difference from the appx 800mb/sec most USB 3.1 Gen 2 devices showed me. I bought the Samsung Shield, a ruggedized T7, for space and paid appx the same price for 4GB as I did for 2GB of the Fantom. The Fantom runs hot, but not as hot as other devices not sitting on a massive heatsink.I followed a Youtube genius's directions to build a Thunderbolt 3 drive using a 1TB Sabrent Rocket NVME PCIe M.2 card and a Sabrent toolless enclosure. The Fantom runs relatively hot compared to a quality USB-C 3.1 like a T7, but when you get into Thunderbolt, my experience has seen a significant increase in the heat of the device. A 2 GB SSD would have been double the price or more and my Sabrent project was a good deal at the time.. I almost doubled the speed of a USB-C Gen 2 device with 1400mbs read and 1500mbs.Storage prices have dropped significantly, and the Fantom will probably drop as well, as this market segment has seen significant technological improvement. Still, if you need fast external storage today, this is an excellent SSD. I hope it sustains as the heat is a concern, but my Rocket is even hotter but has run “like a champ" for the past 18 months.

I have attached read and write speeds on a Macbook M2 Pro. Not quite up to 3000 but fairly close. It's larger than I expected but in line with drives of the size and speed. Fast shipping.

I use this drive to hold all my DAW sounds. I use Native Instruments Komplete Ultimate among others and the files are huge. I have it plugged into my Mac Studio M2 Max computer and this thing is blazing fast and requires no separate power supply.

We’ve been using this SSD for 49 weeks now. We have a 2017 Mac that had gotten so slow that we were going to replace it. I saw on YouTube how to speed up an old computer so decided to try it. This drive was recommended for a Mac because of thunderbolt.Before the upgrade, it took 3 minutes and 20 seconds to login from pressing return after entering your password. After the upgrade, it takes 12 seconds. Loading applications is lightning fast. Loading webpages is lightning fast. Please see the speed test photos of the internal HDD compared to the external SSD. So instead of spending $2700 on a new Mac, we spent only $200. We could not be more satisfied.You have to clone the HDD to the SSD, then restore the SSD so you can then select the SSD as the boot drive. It takes about 6 hours but it was well worth the effort!!

I purchased this item in approximately 16 months ago. I am a performing musician and recording artist and I needed a fast a reliable drive for audio recording. I attached this unit to a relatively new Mac (less than one year old) using thunderbolt. I paid $433 for this unit which now sells for approximately $180 less. Shortly after putting the unit into service it began to sporadically unmount itself. This has be noted by other reviewers. I suspected the cable might be at fault so I replaced the thunderbolt cable with a genuine Apple brand cable. This would cause my recording software to throw errors saying it could not write files. It also caused audio pops and glitches. This was very frustrating because I would lose tracks and have to recreate my work. Since I am creating music, this drive was costing me time and losing data which was not replaceable. Some of the tracks I created are used in live performance. When copying them to my performance playback unit, the files would be written with zero length, or corrupted. I trusted this drive to back up my files as well. When I attempted to restore from this unit, I found the backups were corrupted, or the unit would unmount when I attempted to copy my work. I have spent two days now trying to recreate work which has been lost on this drive. I am very wary of it and I desperately need to copy all my work from this unreliable unit to a new hard drive.The one thing you need to be certain of when buying a drive is that it will write and read your data back. This unit was expensive and failed miserably. I do not recommend it. It's a risky proposition.

the device looks solid. i immediately formatted to encrypted apfs. ran a amorphous diskmark and reads go up to 2.7GB but writes are around 1.7GB only. not sure if that's due to encryption.