External SSD

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Adamcski

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Well I need to bite the bullet and get one.

I am looking for 2tb units and my how the price has increased.

My current ones are Samsung Shield which I have had no issues with. These seem very rare currently, obviously the Rolex of the SSD world lol

I can grab Crucial or Sandisk versions from Amazon with Crucial X 10 Pro being cheaper.

What do you recommend folks?
 
Western digital. Seemed a reasonable balance between cost and performance at one time.
 
I ran a 500GB Samsung T5 as my main drive (via USB) on a late-2012 iMac27 for quite few years (maybe five) without any issue whatsoever. So, I'd consider Samsung again. Current T7 2TB seems to be about £250.
 
I've been using Samsung 1TB T7 and 2TB T9 for several years with no problems, and for about a year, 8TB WD Black NVME for a bigger and faster solution. The price for that has jumped up a lot.
 
Would avoid an external tbh. You will get much better speed with an internal and a caddy for the same or less money.
 
f/1.2 said:
Would avoid an external tbh. You will get much better speed with an internal and a caddy for the same or less money.
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It's for my laptop.

What would you suggest? One of the cases and a memory stick type arrangement
 
Kaolin said:
Depends how fast you want, I get 600-800 mb/s with external Samsung T5 and T7s and similar with a Crucial X9. I get ~3000mb/s with OWC 1m2 external housing using thunderbolt 4 and WD Black NVME drives on a MacStudio and MacBook Pro.
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I get about 2700/2800 mb/s using WD black with ACASIS enclosure and TB4
 
Adamcski said:
It's for my laptop.

What would you suggest? One of the cases and a memory stick type arrangement
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A decent spec NVME and a TB5 enclosure would be great I have a couple myself however even a much cheaper TB4 enclosure will be a lot faster than you will get from an off the shelf external.
 
I also use a WD black with ACASIS enclosure. Works fine. The speed is fine but i probably don’t need that speed most of the time.

Backblaze produces stats of hard disk failures.

I doubt there is much difference between the main suppliers. If you get a duff one, it can be returned. Look for special offers given the substantial price increases?
 
Adamcski said:
I can grab Crucial or Sandisk versions from Amazon with Crucial X 10 Pro being cheaper.
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I like Crucial drives a lot ( I have five of different types and generations) but sadly Crucial are exiting the consumer market for both SSDs and RAM in favour of better profitability in strategic enterprise sales. Another case of the juggernaut of AI investment capital squeezing everyone else, I am afraid.

This is the end of the line for them. Either take that as opportunity to snap them up while you still can, or a risk for support disappearing soon.

Edit: the announcement in December- new retail shipments to cease at the end of Feb 2026

 
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At the moment I’m using a crucial X9 as my LR/PS drive on my new Mac mini M4 works faultlessly. That’s the reason I was advised to just go for a base unit rather than pay for apples rip off memory prices , no doubt in the future I will need a larger drive but I wouldn’t hesitate buying crucial again
 
ancient_mariner said:
Buy direct. Although in the light of @Raymond Lin comment, WD and SanDisk are the same company.

I have a 2TB WD black nvme drive in my processing computer.
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Not the nvme, this is specfically one of those external SSDs, the black ones with one side that is slightly rubberised. I think it is the 2TB versions that it was effected mostly by. I have one of the 1TB versions that I bought about a year before all that happened so mine isn't in that batch.
 
Adamcski said:
I know nothing about these nvme drives and enclosures, I assume I can just grab a drive and enclosure from Amazon?
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Fortunately I bought mine before the price increases. NVMe from Amazon but the enclosure was direct from ACASIS US which was cheaper after sales tax and delivery, arrived very quickly.

No doubt things have moved on so please check.
 
There are a couple of ways to do this.

You can but it all finished, and it is an SSD, even a SATA one. These are the slowest
Then you can get other prebuilt SSD with 10gbps speed, which is like up to 1000mbps
The fastest within reasonable price (before Christmas) would be a thunderbolt or USB4 enclosure with a nvme that does more than 4000mbps
If you are minted then you can get a Thunderbolt 5 drive and a 7000mbps nvme and put it in.

I have several 7000mbps nvme SSD in a USB4.0 enclosure, meaning basically the enclosure is the bottle neck, when I got it, the price was reasopnable.

I have 1TB in the grey one and 2TB in the silver one.

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I also made this USB hub where it has a space for a small Nvme. I put 512gb in there as an emergency. It has a magsafe ring, can be use for phone but I keep it with my laptop.


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I don't have a photo but I put these together last November

Case


NVME (I paid only £95)

 
So if I buy that Samsung NVMe and that case do I need anything else? I watched some YouTube videos and they have some form of paste or pad that they put on it, a thermal pad?

Sorry this is all new to me...I've just purchased the BOGO Samsung t7 ones before
 
Adamcski said:
So if I buy that Samsung NVMe and that case do I need anything else? I watched some YouTube videos and they have some form of paste or pad that they put on it, a thermal pad?

Sorry this is all new to me...I've just purchased the BOGO Samsung t7 ones before
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Some of the case comes with thermal pads, some don't. you can always buy it and wait until you get it before getting any thermal pads. I bought like 10cm x 10cm square sheet and kinda cut to size as i need it for various builds.

I do it this way because it was the most value for money and it lets me move the drives around. Like some enclosures are slower than others so if in the future the faster enclosures drops in price. I can move the drives into those and gain a lot of speed. I can basically double some of my drives' speed this way.
 
Raymond Lin said:
Then you can get other prebuilt SSD with 10gbps speed, which is like up to 1000mbps
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PLEASAE clarify your cases! I'm guessing that the "mbps" refers to Mega (M) rather than Milli (m) but is the b Bytes or bits?
 
This TB4 enclosure is reasonably priced. I have the TB5 version and it works great.

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This TB5 enclosure is an absolute bargain but I haven’t personally used this brand. It’s twice the price on Amazon.







IMG_4975.png
 
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