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Monoprice external SSDs -- any opinions or reviews?

sjinsjca

sjinsjca

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Oct 30, 2008
2,239
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Monoprice, a fantastic source of computer stuff, now has bus-powered Thunderbolt SSDs at good prices. Ideal for road warriors with Thunderbolt-equipped laptops!

Their name for these is "Neutrino" and if you search their site, two models currently come up: 120GB and 256GB.

The internal SSDs are SanDisk and appear to have impressive specs.

http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=113&cp_id=11307&cs_id=1130705&p_id=10995&seq=1&format=2 for example.

The only disappointment for me is that they don't support daisy-chaining. (But then, external USB drives don't either.) Otherwise this would seem ideal for my usage (externally-stored virtual machines).

...Any opinions or reviews?


UPDATE: As with some other Monoprice Thunderbolt hardware, this is manufactured by Akitio. Here's one review: http://www.computershopper.com/stor...ino-thunderbolt-edition-120gb/#product-review ...and another by a Macrumors forum member: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1747114/
 
Last edited:
ColdCase said:
Another disappointment is that they are using SanDisk drives :(
Click to expand...

Someone toss me a clue, please. I thought that was a decent supplier...? The reviews I added at the end of my original post seem positive enough.
 
sjinsjca said:
Someone toss me a clue, please. I thought that was a decent supplier...? The reviews I added at the end of my original post seem positive enough.
Click to expand...

There is nothing wrong with Sandisk SSD drives. It is one of the top picks by a respected reviewer here.
 
ColdCase said:
Another disappointment is that they are using SanDisk drives :(
Click to expand...

ok, are you more concerned about giving up some transfer speed or firmware that is very reliable?

It's 128GB, you're not transferring terabytes of data. Even at 400MB/s you can fill that whole thing in 5 minutes.
 
The drive referenced is 256 GB. SanDisk has been pretty durable with its marvell controller, but for only $35 more they could have put an equivalent sized and current SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD in there.... and really had something. Another $25 for a Samsung 850 pro with its 10 year warranty.

I think with SSD, it is generally not about capacity, but OS, game, or app responsiveness.

Just saying that perhaps the price reflects the older almost obsolete SSD.
 
I took a look at the monoprice.com drive in the link above, and....

$336 for a 256gb drive?

Is this a joke?

You can pick up a Crucial 256gb SSD for a price of about $110.

Then, drop it into an Inateck 2.5" USB3 enclosure with UASP support for about $18.

For about $130, you'll have a USB3 drive that will run as fast (or nearly as fast) as the thunderbolt drive above, and $200 extra in your hand...
 
Fishrrman said:
I took a look at the monoprice.com drive in the link above, and....

$336 for a 256gb drive?

Is this a joke?

You can pick up a Crucial 256gb SSD for a price of about $110.

Then, drop it into an Inateck 2.5" USB3 enclosure with UASP support for about $18.

For about $130, you'll have a USB3 drive that will run as fast (or nearly as fast) as the thunderbolt drive above, and $200 extra in your hand...
Click to expand...


Hey, you could go even farther and compare it to a spinning disk! Then, what a ripoff, hm?

...The keyword is "almost". For some usage cases (virtual machines, heavy video editing) the edge Thunderbolt provides can be significant.

The main point is that bus-powered Thunderbolt external SSDs are starting to happen and prices are starting to fall.
 
I put Samsung 1TB SSD into Inateck USB 3 enclosure that is buss powered and get over 400MBs read and write. I use that drive in the field. At home I have RAID sets attached by TB. The RAID sets are HD.
 
MCAsan said:
I put Samsung 1TB SSD into Inateck USB 3 enclosure that is buss powered and get over 400MBs read and write. I use that drive in the field. At home I have RAID sets attached by TB. The RAID sets are HD.
Click to expand...

Block throughput is a small part of the story. Where TB has the advantage is in rapid random reads and rights, as in running a virtual machine or doing heavy photo or video editing and rendering.

Don't get me wrong, USB3 is great and a huge advancement over USB2, but for some applications it's still a bottleneck. You can tell what applications those are: a native SSD runs rings around them. And Thunderbolt is native.
 
MCAsan said:
What is a native SSD?
Click to expand...

One connected to a controller on the system bus rather than funneling through a pipe like USB or a LAN. Best for bandwidth and responsiveness in transfers large and small.
 
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