Fantom Drives - 4TB External 3D NAND TLC Portable Solid State Drive - Thunderbolt 3 & 4 USB 3.2 Type-C - 2800MB/s - Intel Certified -TB3X-2300N4TB

Very well built, fast. Third one that I have purchased. No problems on an M3 Mac as a Time Machine back up. Is recognized by my older 2019 Mac Pro as a startup drive.

Only took about 30mins for 2 partition/AES-256 encryption, if I recall about 45 to an hour for roughly 400gb. So yup I’m 💯% pleased. It did get warm to touch after the big transfer and that would be common for those sizes.

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.

Extremely fast external drive. Plug and play setup. Great value for the price.

I have to be honest, I was not feeling too good about this purchase with the much slower than expected results from Blackmagic speed test. I then ran Amorphous DiskMark which gave better reads but an even uglier picture on the writes. I am using an older 2016 MBP with an i7 so maybe this is causing these results? I was under the impression, having read prior to purchase that these have WD Black drives and someone mentioned here on Amazon that their 2GB had PNY drives. I don't know exactly what drive is in this enclosure since I haven't opened it up but when testing, it showed up as an Extreme6 drive, which I can find ZERO information on. The only thing I know for sure is that it is running ECFM15.1 firmware which resolves to a Phison controller.I have found that benchmarks really don't tell the whole story when it comes to performance for normal daily activities. Initially, I was thinking about returning the drive due to the disappointing benchmarks but decided since it uses TB3, benchmarks showed It is still noticeably faster than the other drives I've been using on the USB3.1 Gen2 ports. I had the perfect (for me) normal use test for the Fantom Drive Extreme- I moved a 600GB folder of music files, approximately 40,000 files, to the Fantom Drive from another external ssd using 3.1 gen2. The results that I experienced changed my mind about returning this drive. I saturated the 3.1 Gen2 drive max rest speed for the entire 600GB transfer without any slowing down during writes on the FD Extreme. Sure, the results could have been better as a whole but all in all, I am now happy with the drive although I certainly would have been happier if I had experienced speeds closer to those stated in the description and reviews.I do understand that "up to" means exactly that when it comes to advertisements and more often than not, the typical results will not likely be comparable. That's OK though- got it on a very good sale, it is fast enough and with a 5 year warranty, it's hard to go wrong.

While it worked it was speedy and compact and great. Then after three days of compiling and rendering outputs saved to it, and over 1TB of information deposited, it failed to show up during boot (macbook pro). tried it on two other machines and a dozen different cables beyond the included one to no avail.Obviously isn’t a problem for most people, but there exists a possibility it’s going to take 30 hours of work to the grave; and if that hapoens it sucks.Others blamed the case, so i took mine apart and found a nice insulating piece of plastic between thermal putty and nvme stick. oops. anyway, took out thr stick, transferred it to another enclosure and hip hip hooray: the stick is fine, so the data is saved. that said, the case is now in the recycling bin and i have an nvme stick without a home

Excellent drive. Use it between computers (Mac and Windows) with no issues