Fastest option for bus-powered external hd?

The Firmtek Miniswap U3 for 2.5 bus power
Caldigit AV Pro for large single drive storage (bus power with SSD only)
Both have UASP compatible chips for new Macs with USB3

At some point, Caldig will release the T series single/dual Thunderbolt cases that should outflank everything else in it's range. Same design as the AV Pro with compatible trays.

Good luck in your search

 

The contestants are the elgato Thunderbolt SSD and the LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt SSD (Yes, you can replace the orange 'bumper' with a black, navy or olive one, or remove it altogether).


However, it you're after insane SSD performance, there's the Pegasus J2, which is the 'The World's Fastest and Smallest Thunderbolt™ Enabled Storage'.
Instead of housing a single 2.5" SSD, it houses two mSATA SSDs, which in RAID0 will output up to 750MB/s with the stock SSDs and it's physically smaller than the other Thunderbolt SSDs, about the size of a Magic Mouse.
If you install Crucial m4 or the upcoming Crucial M500s in the J2, it should perform somewhere towards 1GB/s, with store space up to 2x960GB.


Those are all nice and stuff, but I guess they're not what you're after. But no worries, Seagate's got you covered: They have the Backup Plus Portable Thunderbolt adapter. It's bus-powered.

You buy the adapter once, and then all you need are the drives which range at the moment up to the 1.5TB Backup Plus Portable drive. You can also buy empty enclosures on eBay and install you own hard drive (although that might not end up being cheaper, as the Backup Plus drive cost pretty much the same as the bare drives), or even connect any 2.5" hard drive or SSD without an enclosure to the adapter.
If you ever need it, every Backup Plus Portable hard drive you buy comes with a USB 3.0 to SATA cable so you can hook up multiple drives to your Mac at once or connect them to older Macs without Thunderbolt.

Is that what you're looking for?