Nothing "ultra fast" about that. And quite expensive as well. I got a Acasis Thunderbolt 3 / USB 4 enclosure and a WD Black SN850 2TB for €220 in total thanks to a good deal. This one scores up to 3200MB/s read and 2200MB/s write.
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Review: Plugable's 2TB Thunderbolt SSD Offers Ultra Fast Transfer Speeds
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What is keeping the price of Thunderbolt at the same level that it has always been? The low price on a one terabyte Western Digital Black 770 NVME drive is $79.99 on Best Buy and Amazon a few weeks ago. That is a top level performance drive. That type of drive was $300- four years ago. You can buy 1TB SATA SSD drives for $55 that would cost over $250 six years ago.
Every year Thunderbolt is the very same sky high price as the previous year, as the previous four years, the previous six years and the previous eight years. I have never seen any computer technology hold the same price year after year after year.
This is some kind of monopoly.
thunderbolt requires a thunderbolt controller chip which is an expensive little piece of hardware, especially with this chip shortage. they are harder to source than a usb controller.
AFAIK all thunderbolt controllers are made by intel.
Not related to this topic I guess, but last week I discovered I could watch movies stored on my thumb drive on my iPad via the USB-C connection.
A mixture of "because they can" and lack of demand. Low prices need high volume. If you're not doing high-end video editing that needs the throughput, drives like this are overkill.
If you really need the extra raw speed of Thunderbolt then that's the price - but for the vast majority of use cases USB 3.1g2 is still fast enough. Apart from the extra cost of the interface, if you're talking about a single SSD device only a high-end SSD will push more than 10 Gbps, and it's only comparatively recently that such devices have been generally available, Add to that, all of these benchmarks are measuring peak contiguous read/write speed which is rarely hit in general use, so ypu're really looking at diminishing returns once you go beyond USB speeds - you really have to need that bandwidth for something like high resolution video editing to rule out USB 3.1g2.
You can get a USB 3.1g2 SSD drive for a fraction of this price and it will still be a lot faster than anything you had a few years ago.
I’m happy with my Samsung T7 2TB SSD which I picked up in a sale for €140, it may not be as fast as a Thunderbolt 3 drive but it’s fast enough over USB-C for pretty much everything and a lot cheaper.
Pluggable's pricing for this seems a bit absurd at 600+. The speed is not bad for a single drive Nvme SSD, but for that price, you can buy two 2TB Nvme SSDs and place them in a $125 to $150 Sabrent Dual Nvme SSD enclosure (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08S5JPWR6?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details) that will run at around 2300-2500 MBps and net you 4TB total space as a RAID. Total cost about $400 or so if you catch the Nvme drives on sale, like I did on Amazon, for about $136 (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09FS8XFKD?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details) each. I actually have two of the enclosures with 2 Nvme SSDs in each of them running all four drives as a RAID. Getting about 3500-4500 MBps from Black Magic speed test.
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I’ve had an OWC 2TB Thunderbolt3 drive for a year with amazing reliability and blazing speeds 2,800+ Mbs read and write. And it has a separate TB3 cable. And it looks nice. And it’s ruggedized. $469 for 2TB, $869 for 4TB, and smaller sizes available, too. No special introductory price needed.
Thunderbolt 3 is capable of 40 Gbps. I have a 2017 iMac with Thunderbolt 3 and the System Info page has always said "Up to 40 Gbps." Thunderbolt 4 did not exist in Apple products until 2020 or 2021.
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The only minon advantage is it eliminates one point of accidental disconnect. Having learned the hard way with lost data portable hard drives with a mobile device can turn into a bad day with the most minimal mishap. And USC-C is a VERY easy port to bork with one slight movement.
I did something similar but I built my own - I used a Sabrent USB-C NMVE enclosure with a 2TB M2 SSD and the total package cost maybe $200. Because Apple Silicon Macs have fussy USB controllers that don't always link at 10 Gbps when the drives are rated as such I wanted to be sure it would work (my current SanDisk 1TB is capped at 5 Gbps on M1 Macs even though it connects at 10 on my old Intel MBP).
Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 limits PCIe data to ≈22 Gbps. No-one has achieved much more than 25 Gbps.
The full 40 Gbps cannot be used up unless you add DisplayPort data to the Thunderbolt stream. PCIe can use whatever bandwidth is not used by DisplayPort up to ≈22 Gbps.
Seems to be a good SSD with poor design. Design should be much better.
No $20 NVMe case will ever touch the speed of this drive. Limited to 1000 MB/s. U might maybe 800-900 MBs *max* in day to day use.
I also have the same setup as bucketheadron -- dual Sabrent NVMe TBolt enclosure with two 2 TB Inland Pro drives set as a 4TB RAID 0. Connected to my 2020 27" iMac 128/1 TB /3.8 i7. I get 2100 /2500 pretty consistently in speed tests. Internal 1 TB is faster still, but I dont store any files on it exccept system/apps -- about 400 MB.
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Calling this a "review" kills MR's credibility for anything that is actually a review. This was clearly just an advertisement for a poor quality external drive.
Exactly. Several years ago Amazon was selling the Visiontek version with 512GB for $99. I bought several at that time (NVMe SSDs of that size were selling for almost that much without a case at that time). They are very fast (2000-2400 GB/s) and pretty well built, although I agree a separate cable would have been nice. You can open them up and replace the SSD with a bigger one (just need to peel the rubber strips on the bottom back a little to reveal the screws).
I was looking for comments like this - I did the same thing - why would anybody pay $even half, like $350-do what I did and BGPL did and make your own from Amazon or newegg-sourced parts.
Honestly I think the best option is to buy a TB enclosure and a separate SSD.
Bought a Sabrent 8TB M2 SSD about a year ago and use it for TimeMachine on my MBook Pro (4TB SSD).
You could say it is overkill - but no noise and nearly no latency for back-up and recovery.
Impossible to buy as a package.
Bought a Sabrent 8TB M2 SSD about a year ago and use it for TimeMachine on my MBook Pro (4TB SSD).
You could say it is overkill - but no noise and nearly no latency for back-up and recovery.
Impossible to buy as a package.