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Western Digital Debuts First My Passport Portable SSD
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USB 2.0 speeds are completely saturated by HDDs. The idea seems quite silly to me. Drive capacities tend to update year over year. SSDs may not progress as quickly, but these prices will still vary over time. It also needs to be stated that these drives are not immortal. SSDs still fail. The cases themselves can also fail, so you still need backups.
Choices and competition are good. USB 3.1 Gen 2 in Western My Passport SSD is great. But how does it fully compare to the current gold standard: Samsung Portable SSD T3, which amazingly remains cold even after booting Mac and working from it all day long? http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/portable/t3.html
BTW, bring also larger sizes like 4TB and larger (T3 already has 2TB).
BTW, bring also larger sizes like 4TB and larger (T3 already has 2TB).
I have been using a Sandisk Extreme pro 500 (480gb) for a year now and I love it. (Amazon had a 1/2 off sale on sandisk products!) The lightness means that you can just lift you laptop and move it with the drive just dangling. It's soooo much faster than a normal external that you can edit video in FCPX off of it.
When my connecter failed I was able to pop the drive out and copy the files (unlike most WD drives) and sandisk replaced it with the 510 which is splash proof and dust proof!
I love it
When my connecter failed I was able to pop the drive out and copy the files (unlike most WD drives) and sandisk replaced it with the 510 which is splash proof and dust proof!
I love it
Very very slowly, as with any USB 2.0 device. But it's hard to see why it wouldn't work.
And yeah, I feel your pain. USB 2.0 is one of the main reasons I finally felt I had to upgrade my old Mac Mini. It has a Thunderbolt connector, but peripherals for that are really overpriced, and its other high-speed option (FireWire) is dying/dead in the marketplace. It's a shame, because otherwise that Mini is still performing quite nicely. It's a shame Apple waited so long to embrace USB 3.0.
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I want to replace my aging collection of external spinning platters with SSD for data integrity purposes. They also require huge amount of power and produce quite a bit of heat, some noise, as well as take up a lot of room. The only certainty with a spinning hard drive is that it will eventually die.
So speed is definitely not just the only consideration. I just wish it wasn't so cost prohibitive still.
Are SSDs providing the same data integrity as HDDs? I know Samsung's Pro models have a 10 year warranty and the EVOs have a 5 year warranty, but I thought spinning HDDs were less susceptible to data corruption and SSDs risked losing data if they were powered off for long periods of time.
Unpowered flash storage can lose data over time, but we are talking months not days. Pretty good article here about it.
So yeah... if you want to archive off some photos and put the drive on a shelf for a year, an SSD would not be the best option.
Thanks for that link. I need to upgrade our XBox One storage and plan on doing so via the external USB port. I was considering an SSD, but not now, as our X1 may be off for a week or more depending on time of the year and such. I just don't have the patience to reinstall games from disc just because the SSD was not powered.
I think for a week or so, you would be okay. From what I understand it would take at least three months or so, and even then it may not happen at all.
And there was me thinking the design is absolutely awful.
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SSD drive connected to USB 2.0 is absolutely pointless. USB 2.0 will give you at most about 30-35 Mbyte per second. That's a lot slower than any spinning hard drive, which can easily do up to 120 Mbyte per second. Save your money and get a 1TB spinning hard drive for £50 or 2TB for £70.
Isn't data recovery more reliable from an HDD in the event of failure too? I mean there's a physical platter that can be read manually if need be. How easily can the data be recovered from an SSD?
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I've found that even my Thunderbolt connection was limited by the internal bus speed on my older Macs, making it no more desirable than the USB 2.0 or FireWire 800 ports.
Congrats, this time don't 'just pick up your Mac and let "it" dangle' ... and your 'connector won't fail'
Reading the front half was cringe worthy! The second ½ put the worthiness in the cringe!
I like these prices. I was looking at Best Buy and checking out the 2.5" USB 3 enclosures ($29.99) and SanDisk, PNY & Samsung Evo 850 drives - all SSD, and weekly, one of the three is on sale. Last week I bought a 960GB SanDisk 2 internal SSD ($140 off for $259) and the enclosure for $30 - essentially a TB SSD external drive that's reading @ 520/writing @ 480Mb/s under three hundred, I thought, made it a steal.
Then I read this lol
It's all great news though, I picked up the earlier mentioned SanDisk 256 stick and while not an SSD by any stretch.... it's still a 256GB thumb drive able to carry more data, media, and more than before and clip it to the key ring!
I'm looking forward to Thunderbolt PCIe SSD options ...able to double, triple or quadruple USB 3/SATA speeds at their saturation point. An eGPU (box/power & cooling) w/PCIe or m.2 slot for an SSD inside the box! Seems like a doable task and for a grand, you have the ability to add high speed storage and high performance GPU to your MacBook Pro .....we'll see
The Apple HDMI adapter for the Macbook has a USB-C port for the power cable as well as a USB-3 port so I can connect a USB-3 portable drive while the Macbook is charging.
Since there is only one USB Type-C port on the WD drive this means the Macbook cannot be powered while using this drive, unless I have a USB-C hub or similar (looking for one now...).
Belkin have a hub with 2 USB-C ports & 2 USB-A ports:
http://www.belkin.com/au/F4U090/p/P-F4U090/
But that only gives me one extra USB-C after plugging in the power cable...
Since there is only one USB Type-C port on the WD drive this means the Macbook cannot be powered while using this drive, unless I have a USB-C hub or similar (looking for one now...).
Belkin have a hub with 2 USB-C ports & 2 USB-A ports:
http://www.belkin.com/au/F4U090/p/P-F4U090/
But that only gives me one extra USB-C after plugging in the power cable...
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This drive is currently Best Buy exclusive and I just picked up a 512GB one yesterday. It is very light and small, half metal (silver part) half plastic (black part). Comes with a USB Type-C cable with 3.1 gen 2 support and a USB Type-C to Type-A adaptor.
I don't have a Samsung T3 to compare, but the speed is decent. Blackmagic results show around 400MB/s write and 425MB/s read with either the provided cable or my own Belkin TB3 cable connected to a 13" MacBook Pro with no touch bar. Wondering if and how to get the claimed 515MB/s speed result.
I don't have a Samsung T3 to compare, but the speed is decent. Blackmagic results show around 400MB/s write and 425MB/s read with either the provided cable or my own Belkin TB3 cable connected to a 13" MacBook Pro with no touch bar. Wondering if and how to get the claimed 515MB/s speed result.
Ultimately the speed of the external device is limits by the internal bus, and USB overhead.