Fantom Drives Extreme 2TB External SSD - 2800MB/s, Thunderbolt 3 and 4, USB Type-C, Aluminum, 3D NAND TLC, TB3X-2300N2TB

It's pretty expensive but the speeds seem fine playing my games thus far. I need to get another lightning cable I guess that's like 3 inches longer. I don't know y it's so short. Anyway it feels solid and is doing it's going.

La velocidad de los discos thunderbolt es impresionante y despues de 1 año de uso considero que es un buen disco portatil. La calidad de materiales es 10/10 y aunque es para windows y mac, yo lo formatie para usarlo solo en mac.

the device looks solid. i immediately formatted to encrypted apfs. ran a amorphous diskmark and reads go up to 2.7GB but writes are around 1.7GB only. not sure if that's due to encryption.

I've been looking for an external SSD that is reasonably fast when using my M2 Mac Studio. The Mac's internal drive has scorching speeds that hover at 6GB/sec write and 5GB/sec Read with Blackmagic speed tests. The Fantom gives a consistent 2.8 Read and 2.2 write connected directly to a Thunderbolt port or the Caldigit Thunderbolt Hub connected to a Thunderbolt port. This is a huge difference from the appx 800mb/sec most USB 3.1 Gen 2 devices showed me. I bought the Samsung Shield, a ruggedized T7, for space and paid appx the same price for 4GB as I did for 2GB of the Fantom. The Fantom runs hot, but not as hot as other devices not sitting on a massive heatsink. I followed a Youtube genius's directions to build a Thunderbolt 3 drive using a 1TB Sabrent Rocket NVME PCIe M.2 card and a Sabrent toolless enclosure. The Fantom runs relatively hot compared to a quality USB-C 3.1 like a T7, but when you get into Thunderbolt, my experience has seen a significant increase in the heat of the device. A 2 GB SSD would have been double the price or more and my Sabrent project was a good deal at the time.. I almost doubled the speed of a USB-C Gen 2 device with 1400mbs read and 1500mbs. Storage prices have dropped significantly, and the Fantom will probably drop as well, as this market segment has seen significant technological improvement. Still, if you need fast external storage today, this is an excellent SSD. I hope it sustains as the heat is a concern, but my Rocket is even hotter but has run “like a champ" for the past 18 months.

This drive changed my life, at least as far as managing photos on my M1 Mac Mini is concerned. I'd long since transferred my Photos library (55K photos, 2.2K videos) to an external USB drive because I didn't have enough storage on my Mac Mini. I hadn't realized that that would actually degrade the performance of my Photos library because of the slow transfer speed of standard USB. I visited an Apple Store and discussed pros and cons of buying a new M2 Mini with more memory and/or more storage, but the "genius" (if they call them that anymore) recommended getting a Thunderbolt SSD for my Photos library. This Fantom drive seemed to offer great performance and capacity for the money, so I bought it and transferred my Photos library, and the rest is history. It's like having a new Mac. And, I got a big enough size that I have plenty of space to fool around with 4K video, etc for a while. It's true I haven't done things like use this "in the field" where I'd put the durability to a test, but I have no regrets about this purchase so far.