How are you using Thunderbolt External SSDs?

Hardware
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I have recently taken an interest in external storage. As a personal project, I decided that I wanted to offload a lot of archive data from my internal SSD in my 2023 Mac Mini M2 Pro onto various external spinning and ssd drives I’ve acquired over the years, which have just been lying around. The Mac Mini has a 2TB internal drive with 1TB free space, but I don’t want to let the data just pile up year after year and wanted to have better storage hygiene, if you will. So first I took care of that problem, so far I have unloaded 200GB to two external drives connected to a Satechi 4-port usb-c hub plugged directly into my Mac Mini (one of which is being backed up to Backblaze to accomplish 3-2-1 backup).

The Mac Mini is on a shelf under my desk, so I plug a lot of drives into my HP27Z monitor on my desktop for convenience sake. Black Magic Speed tests show read/write speeds at approximately 400 mb/s for these drives.

In my work, I will occasionally get 100s of GBs of data that I need to transfer from a flash drive to my internal drive, as the flash drive has special encryption software that makes it very cumbersome to read the data off of it directly. Typically, the transfers will take 1-3 hours to complete. The source drive is usually connected to my monitor via usb-a and the destination is usually a Samsung usb-c drive also plugged to my monitor.

So I decided that I next wanted to see what the Thunderbolt ports on my Mac mini could really do, and I purchased a SanDisk Professional Pro-G40 SSD and plugged it directly into one of my Mac Mini Thunderbolt ports with an OWC Thunderbolt 4 cable. I was very impressed with this drive’s speed (2500 mb/s RW). It copied 130 GB from my internal disk in 5 minutes. And I like that I cannot tell any difference in reading the data off the disk than I can my internal disk–making it effectively an extension of my internal drive.

I am surprised that I don’t see more Thunderbolt external SSDs for sale. This 1TB SanDisk is $179 on Amazon. I don’t really see any others at this price range. The closest appears to be the OWC Express 1M2.

Why aren’t these disks more prevalent? Is it just waiting for the prices to drop? Do people just not need the speed? Or do most people who buy Thunderbolt just need significantly more storage, so they buy NVMe SSDs and put them in arrays in an enclosure? or NAS storage? I’m just curious as to what most people are using and whether you are getting the max speed possible or opting for something that is less speed for convenience (such as NAS)? That is, is Thunderbolt even worth it if you aren’t directly connecting to a Thunderbolt port?

During this process, I just feel like I’m missing something here. Or is it just that everyone’s storage needs are highly individualistic, so there’s just no one-size-fits-most obvious solution.

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It’s highly individual, depending on all the factors you’ve mentioned. If you don’t need the performance, why pay for it? I use these for backups https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08GTYFC37
$85 for 1GB. No reason to pay $179.

And I have a Mac mini server with a 16TB external HDD storage (OWC Gemini, $800, but is also a dock) that performs just fine for it’s needs (probably mostly streaming video).

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I agree, no need to pay for excessive speeds as I have that internally.

I have a reasonably quick 2TB SSD plugged in to provide additional fast storage, but everything else is on HDD because that’s fine.

I put working files in my internal or external SSDs if necessary, and then put them back when I am done.

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Thunderbolt speeds are amazing, I have a Sabrent TB3 enclosure with a SSD for storing gigabytes of sound libraries. But I also happen to have USB3 external drives for storing email archives and I cannot tell what are the benefits of going TB unless I run a proper benchmark. Regular USB external drives are more than enough for most cases so I feel that there is no need to pay the Apple tax here.

For a Mac mini this Sateshi enclosure and hub looks amazing.

2 Likes
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I’m guessing that only “Pros” would even look for a thunderbolt drive.

For most people USB C is good enough and significantly cheaper, so more likely to show up in a search of external storage and compete on price.

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Just wanted to note, I’m a working video editor as my day job, and the reason is price. It’s the same reason the Mac Pro exists at its price point: niche needs. I want the fastest, largest possible drive I can afford to do my work. (spoilers, that’s typically some kind of RAID, usually our network drive; I need both speed and size).

Just so this isn’t a rant, here’s some hopefully helpful insight: our team currently uses a 8-bay RAID 5 synology unit on a 10gbe switch for most of our day-to-day work, but we sync what we need to those Sandisk SSD’s you linked above. I’d like to switch to something like the OWC M.2 enclosures you also linked to at some point. Thunderbolt solves a lot of problems, the Sandisks are that funky flavor of USB and while we do get ~800MB/s read/write, getting past 1GB/s would remove any bottlenecks that come from working with multiple streams of 4k+ footage on some projects…that is, drive speed bottlenecks, then we’re into processor bottlenecks, but I digress.

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You could possibly get faster speed if you configured the SSDs as RAID 0. But they call that “scary raid” because if you lose one drive you lose everything on the RAID.

OTOH I’ve read that using SSDs in RAID 5 increases the possibility that all the drives could fail at or near the same time because the drives have the same limit of total writes possible.

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In 15 years in IT I never saw that happen. We had failures, but 1 at a time. Of course we used Compaq/HP hardware. I would always recommend RAID 5, 6 or 10 if you have a hardware RAID. Far less stressful.

RAID 0 I’d only recommend if you REALLY needed the speed, had good (tested) backups, and small Recovery time and recovery point objectives.

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Neither have I, but after reading about it I thought it worth passing along. I always used spinning drives in RAID 5 or 6.

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The drive you mention is £260 on Amazon UK. That’s quite a difference.

My Samsung T7s SSDs appear faster than my 6TB La Cie spinning external drive, but all of them seem ok to me. I think my last T7 cost what you paid for your Thunderbolt.

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I never heard this before but I love it. It certainly gets the message across.

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Have you check out the ACASIS enclosure? They have very good reviews!

If you need the read and right speed, go with these TB4 enclosure.

If just for storage, I prefer the JetDrive approach. I was debating on TB4 external enclosure myself and end up with JetDrive for the convenience. The speed is fast enough for simple file storage.

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Just looking into this. I was already looking into it before yesterday, but since my main 2TB hdd (spinning) tried to commit suicide by leaping onto the floor, I have gone full-on paranoid and copying everything off of it. it is making clicking noises!
So, temporary offloading has finished, all good. But now I need a better setup because I have become the ‘go-to’ person for a local community theater where I’m in charge of prepping video for various replays of Opera (Met Opera) and Stage (National Theater London) productions. My current project is 4.5 hours of video at 1920x1080.
So there is download time, merging, trimming, transcoding, remuxing, copying and then setting them up inside QLab. That is a lot of time spent sitting around while processing or copying is going on. As you might imagine, TB3 cables/drives to go with my Mac Mini M1 ports is sounding pretty nice…
Thanks for the links!