Good external disk for bootcamp (MBP2019)

[Kuzbad]

I am looking to get an external SSD for my MBP 2019 for the sole purpose of running bootcamp for one legacy piece of PC software and a few games. Nothing major, don't need a ton of space, and nothing terrifically intense.

I could get:

Samsung X5 Thunderbolt 500GB for ~$200
Sandisk Extreme 1TB USB-C (not thunderbolt) for ~$165

Seems the Samsung would be a good bit faster. Anybody with personal experiences with either disk, and specifically running bootcamp off an external USB-C/Thunderbolt disk?

Thanks,
-K

 

[barbu]

I have a Samsung T5 500 GB and it's a great little thing. I wasn't aware of the X5 with TB3, that's very nice.
As always, there is a tradeoff between speed/convenience/physical footprint, storage capacity, and cost. Do you value the raw speed of TB3 or do you value double the capacity at less money? Only you know the answer. Either way, those are both fine choices.

 

[iMacDragon]

I think the issue here is OP wants to do the full bootcamp install to external, which via USB is certainly not a fire and forget thing. I believe it's possible, but not supported in any way.

As to installing on a TB disk, I've not yet seen much reported success on T2 machines, as I was wondering similar things.

 

[Kuzbad]

So I bought the X5 Thunderbolt 500gb, and the speed is fantastic, but I am NOT able to boot windows 10 bootcamp from the drive. There have been sporadic reports of success on reddit and elsewhere, but I haven't managed it yet. Windows 10 starts initializing and dies with a inaccessible media error before getting to the desktop.

So I'm currently running with a small bootcamp partition on the main SSD with programs/data stored on the X5. Working fine, though I would like to have all of bootcamp on the X5 eventually.