I’m thinking about getting a bus-powered 4 TB SSD to take over from two archive hard drives and serve as the destination for the nightly duplicate of my 1 TB internal drive. I might also build a collection of virtual machines for older versions of macOS on the SSD.
4 TB USB SSDs aren’t very expensive, but given the desire to have this be more than just for backups and archival storage, and from the future-proofing perspective, I’m thinking about getting a Thunderbolt SSD. That drastically reduces the choices and increases the price, which is a little annoying.
The main choices I see are:
OWC Envoy Ultra: $499 — Thunderbolt 5, which my M4 Pro MacBook Pro doesn’t support, but again, future-proofing. And it’s cheaper than the Thunderbolt 4 version.
I have bought three 4Tb Crucial X9 Thunderbolt 4 drives.
Speedy,tiny, two of them were great. One, however failed within a year. As in nothing can see it, no drive or recovery utility whatsoever detects it. I used it for Dropbox only so not an issue to replace it but disappointing nonetheless.
The other two I have a wary eye upon, and a daily backup.
I have three 4TB Thunderbolt SSD drives…all are NVMe enclosures with separately purchased NVMe blades:
4.1TB Sabrent in Orico enclosure
4TB WD SN5000 NVMe in Envoy Express enclosure.
4TB Crucial CT4000P3PSSD8 NVme in Orico enclosure
I have had no trouble with any of them, running 24/7. But they do get warm. iStat menus says the temps are well within limits but the casings are pretty warm. If buying again I would probably get one with a small built in fan. The Envoy is not full 40GB/s spec so not as fast as the other two.
One thing to watch for is that some NVMes have cells on both sides which makes them thick and may not fit the enclosures. From memory the Envoy won’t take a thick NVMe.
I haven’t done an exhaustive comparison but I think you can save c$100 by rolling your own, depending on what you chose. I was more about capacity than max speed.
Some enclosures require special tools and some are tool-less.
based on Howard Oakley’s testing: it is an amazing piece of tech.
For EDC, I use the Samsung T5/T7/T9 series (slower than the Envoy, but robust and cheaper). And for everything in-between, I use Oyen Digital (historically, the Shadow series and their large enclosures for disk drives), though I have not yet tried the U34 Bolt.
I’ve never had any problems with any of these, other than one Oyen Digital 5-bay HD enclosure — which they replaced promptly for me (again, I bought directly from them).
A comment on OWC’s external drive: If you buy just the enclosure, there’s a 1 year warranty. If you buy the enclosure with a disk inside, there’s a 3 year warranty.
(And I bought another LaCie drive before I realized they’re now owned by Seagate. The last one died after about 3 1/2 years, continuing my TERRIBLE experience with Seagate rotating drives.)
Time Machine is already a separate 2 TB SSD that’s USB 3.something, since performance doesn’t matter at all there.
This drive would be primarily for storage of data I almost never consult, an APFS container for a nightly duplicate, and the VMs. It’s possible I’m overthinking the need for speed with the VMs, but there is also a sense that this is the drive where I’d dump the occasional huge file I encounter, so the higher performance of Thunderbolt might be welcome for more than just the VMs.
Doh! Got the wrong spec in head without checking—thanks! That does point toward a Thunderbolt 5-compatible drive, purely to have the max speed available should I want it.
Do you really need Thunderbolt 4? Or 5? Thunderbolt 3 is plenty fast enough, but doesn’t provide the 100W of power that comes with 4. If you have a high-end Mac and do 4 or 8K video editing maybe you do need many screens and fast and wide data streams but I have been very happy with Sabrent dual nvme enclosure. Like most nvme enclosures it does get quite hot but DriveDX doesn’t pop up any warnings.
The most annoying thing about this enclosure is the placement of the LEDs which are on the same side as the cables.
It’s a real question. I don’t “need” the top level performance, but I was thinking this might be a good chance to upgrade to a setup where performance would never be a question.
I have on OWC Envoy Ultra 4TB that is purchased shortly after the model was released and have used it as my Timemachine device. It works away every hour and has not failed. However storage wise it is a bit under utilised. SSDs don’t make any noise, which is nice after having HDDs on the desk.
In reality…thunderbolt anything is really more than fast enough for doing anything short of rendering a Hollywood blockbuster. Sure…TB5 is faster than TB4…but it’s also more expensive and for anything is mere mortals are doing…TB4 is more than fast enough for the price gap. Unless one is making money with it…spending the extra cash for TB5 drives is really not worth it. Time saved in typical operations like photo processing or whatever is like a reduction from 12 seconds to 10…
I agree with Neil. If you really want to be cutting edge, you’ll need a healthy bank account. Then you can throw out all that copper and use only optical fibre. Here is OWC’s take from a few years back