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.

UPDATE I reformatted the drive as APFS encrypted and saw ~4.8% drop in write speed to 2439-2446 MB/s. Read stayed in the low 2500s. Still blazing and now more secure. I also picked up a Maxonar Thunderbolt 4 half-meter cable for something a little longer. The included cable is labeled as Thunderbolt 3. There is no noticeable speed difference between them. ORIGINAL REVIEW I got the 4TB non-TLC with the 3k speed and it's delivering about 3x the write and 4x the read speed of my Samsung T7 of the same capacity, which is basically a USB 3.2 speed drive, not Thunderbolt. This is about 4 ounces heavier than the T7, with a solid feeling metal case vs. the T7's rubberized case,. It's a thicc little drive that's a smidger taller, wider, and thicker than the T7. I tested it against the internal drive in a 2 month old MacBook Pro M3 (16") and a 3-year-old desktop PC gaming rig. While it got blown out of the water by the MBP's internal drive which was 2-3x faster in each measure, it was 80% as fast on write and almost double on read compared to the desktop with NVME. When you see people claiming they sped up an old, slow machine by using some variant of this as a boot drive, I'd bet they're telling the truth. It's fast enough to power a number of low-to-mid-range laptops or even desktops if they have USB 4 or Thunderbolt 4. Obviously I just picked this up and I'm in a honeymoon phase. We'll have to see how durable both the drive and its speeds are. But I am predicting I am not going to have storage anxiety with my MBP for a while.

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.

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.

I purchased this item in approximately 16 months ago. I am a performing musician and recording artist and I needed a fast a reliable drive for audio recording. I attached this unit to a relatively new Mac (less than one year old) using thunderbolt. I paid $433 for this unit which now sells for approximately $180 less. Shortly after putting the unit into service it began to sporadically unmount itself. This has be noted by other reviewers. I suspected the cable might be at fault so I replaced the thunderbolt cable with a genuine Apple brand cable. This would cause my recording software to throw errors saying it could not write files. It also caused audio pops and glitches. This was very frustrating because I would lose tracks and have to recreate my work. Since I am creating music, this drive was costing me time and losing data which was not replaceable. Some of the tracks I created are used in live performance. When copying them to my performance playback unit, the files would be written with zero length, or corrupted. I trusted this drive to back up my files as well. When I attempted to restore from this unit, I found the backups were corrupted, or the unit would unmount when I attempted to copy my work. I have spent two days now trying to recreate work which has been lost on this drive. I am very wary of it and I desperately need to copy all my work from this unreliable unit to a new hard drive. The one thing you need to be certain of when buying a drive is that it will write and read your data back. This unit was expensive and failed miserably. I do not recommend it. It's a risky proposition.

After using this for a few weeks now, I'm thoroughly impressed by the speed of the drive. I do large vector illustrations(work) and 3d animation(hobby) and its way faster for me to work directly on the extreme from FD than it is to work on the Mac itself. Fits perfectly into my desk set up and also good because I can carry it around when I'm on my macbook pro. The listing mentions the quality of the build. When I received it, I could definitely feel the quality in my hands from the first time. Hands down would recommend any mac users looking exclusively for mac ssd's. I've added crystal disk results from my pc with thunderbolt 3 port and black magic results with my mac. i got better than advertised speed with the crystal disk surprisingly. I get it, this is pretty expensive, as is any new technology for that matter. However, when comparing the quality and price of other Thunderbolt 3 nvme ssd's, its cheaper and better quality. The performance seems to be more consistent and better as well. First time getting fantom drives but if their other products are as good as this, they got themselves a loyal customer. I'm kind of glad i clicked on a social media ad for once.

I bought this compact SSD for use as the Time Machine backup drive for my 2021 M1Max MacBook Pro laptop/notebook computer. I have only used it three times so far, but it seems to work great; definitely a lot faster than the external hard drive that I had been using for the same purpose previously. This SSD is roughly the same size as a deck of playing cards, but surprisingly heavy for its small size. Naturally, I wish it cost a hundred dollars less, but so far I am quite pleased with it. It is worth noting the Thunderbolt cable that comes with this SSD is quite short, so it works fine if you will only place the SSD on a desk or table right next to your computer, but otherwise you would want to get a high-quality Thunderbolt cable with more length.