Hi @JohnAtl (et all.),
Steven here, I’m one of the founders of Fledging. This is an incredibly late message, so you have my apologies on that. We only just recently found this thread, but wanted to go ahead and reply.
I know first-hand the frustration of system crashes. People have enough stress in their lives, and we’re committed to helping reduce that – not add to it. We’re constantly reworking our products to address issues and decrease friction, and feedback (good and bad) from our users are a critical part of that. So before I dive into the tech side of things, I wanted to say thank you for posting about the issues you experienced.
Performance-wise, I’ll be direct. The speeds you measured sound like you ended up with one of our standard models. That’s a heck of a mix-up, so I’ll checking with our Amazon team to see what happened there. As many of you likely know, the majority of Macs have a performance bottleneck at 1500MB/s, with certain models of MBP and iMac not having the bottleneck. Our standard line is aimed at these bottlenecked drives, thus the 1400-1500 read. Our Turbo drives on a non-bottlenecked machine, such as the MBP 2015, should experience much better speeds. No claim I can make will mean as much as testing it yourself. Therefore I’d love to ship you a Turbo drive to test against your current Sintech + WD configuration.
Fledging uses a similar adapter solution detailed above, however the adapters on the market tend to be several generations behind what we are working with due to our partnership with the primary manufacturer. We also provide a comprehensive warranty on the unit and full support for any issues that arise when upgrading your Macs.
The crashing issue you described was a major problem we ran into. We’ve tracked it down to a manufacturer defect in our adapter solution that, combined with an Apple update that increased the power draw of the SSD, led to kernel panics and reliability issues exactly as you described. We’ve since corrected the issue and implemented much, much more rigorous quality assurance on our units before they get shipped out.
For anyone affected by this issue, or similar drive health complaints, we provide full technical support, no-cost replacements of defective or DoA units, and will work with you to make things right. Just shoot us a message at contact@fledging.net and we’re there to help.