External SSDs - how practical are they in reality?

[Henry762]

Wait; OP got suspended? What happened?

 

[Henry762]

I use an external SSD for Time Machine, and another for a manual backup and storage of stuff I don't need on my Mac 24/7. Fast response time on both.

I have had occasion where the Mac will throw up the '...not safely ejected' window at random times - and its drive will disappear from my desktop. And then, sometimes, reappear again. Most often it seems after an OS upgrade. Takes a few reboots / some hours to correct. Or coming out of sleep.
Some of this I may have resolved on my own by adding the free 'Jettison' app.

Not sure how exactly this works on Mac, but on PC, if you dig into Device Manager, USB controllers have power management enabled by default, which means they will put the ports to "sleep" periodically. I don't think it will cause major issues, but we always disable that feature anyway.

I'd suspect that yes; your specific issue is due to power saving / energy settings.
Esp. for a drive used for backup, I'd absolutely disable that feature.

 

[Henry762]

Whatever you go with, be very very cautious with the *cable* you get. If the enclosure is Thunderbolt, make sure the “cable with USB-C connectors on both ends” that you buy can do the same version/speed of Thunderbolt. I recently discovered, through the use of a tester, that most of my USB-C cables only support USB-2 speeds and are actually intended for charging not data. The wrong cable will totally hose your external drive’s performance.

Yep, absolutely. This bears repeating.

For the longest time, I very mistakenly assumed that "cables are cables" and they were just a fat money grab from vendors. Well, they definitely CAN be, but anyway.

Cables absolutely DO matter.
As in this example; yes, if you get a 40GBPS enclosure + SSD, but use an iPhone USB-C charging cable to connect it to your PC; it might not supply the proper power AND it wont get you anywhere near 40GBPS speeds.
Aren't ALL of apple's cables they ship with iPhone & iPad basically USB 2.0 spec?

This applies for EVERYTHING;
Ethernet patch cables, HDMI, DVI, etc. etc.

Don't go too cheap on cables.