If you want to expand the storage of your new Mac or iPad there are plenty of options
on the market. From Buying your own SSD and putting it in an enclosure, buying a SSD ready
to go, or going with a RAID or NAS box, there are options for everyone. But if you want
the fastest external storage you can buy for your Mac then these Thunderbolt SSDs are your
best options. So, which of these 4 great options should you get?
Hey, I’m Jerry and I have here 4 Thunderbolt 3 SSDs from Western Digital’s G-Technology,
LaCie, OWC and Samsung. I wanted to know which of these devices is the fastest and just the
best value overall. In choosing these specific Thunderbolt 3 drives I wanted them all to
be 1TB in size and not have a built-in thunderbolt cable. …..Each of these SSDs claim a speed
of up to 2800MBps and except for the LaCie which runs about $400, the others run about
$350 for the 1TB models. They each come with their own software for computer backups, but
I am not reviewing that for this video.
The reason I wanted to test thunderbolt SSDs over USB-C, RAID arrays, or a NAS is simply
that the performance of these drives is much higher, the footprint much smaller, and none
of these require external power supplies because they are completely bus powered.
These drives can be used for editing video directly on the computer, used for temporary,
super-fast storage, backups, or even a boot drive for you Mac. Even the new iPad Pro with
M1 can take advantage of faster storage, with apps like LumaFusion announcing that you will
be able to edit directly off of an external drive. If you have an older Mac with a slower
SSD or spinning disk, then installing macOS on an external Thunderbolt drive will make
your computer feel brand new.
So, let’s take a look at these 4 drives and their features before testing their speed.
First, we have the Samsung X5. This drive’s all plastic on the outside with a status light
on the back, a slightly grippy bottom and smooth, shiny top. I like the red accents
of this drive and because it looks cool you know it’s fast.
This drive has a magnesium alloy structure inside that can withstand a 6 ft drop and
comes with a 3-year warranty.
The G-DRIVE Mobile Pro SSD is mostly a soft-touch plastic with a visible blue heat sink and
a front facing status light. The mobile Pro comes with a 5-year warranty if that is important
to you, and can sustain a 3 meter drop and 1000 lbs of crushing power.
The LaCie Rugged SSD Pro is fully encapsulated in a soft silicone case and is the most compact
of the 4 drives. Like I said earlier, LaCie is the most expensive of these 1TB thunderbolt
drives but it does come Ip67 water and dust resistance along with a 3-meter drop protection
and the same 5 year warranty as the G-Drive.
And last, the OWC Envoy Pro FX….This thing feels like a brick. The entire outside is
solid aluminum which my guess is makes it a big heatsink. Its very unassuming with the
basic gray and a white logo. The Envoy Pro FX has a 3-year warranty, IP67 water and dust
resistance, and is drop tested according to some military spec.
To test all 4 of these thunderbolt SSDs I will be connecting them to both an M1 MacBook
Pro and a 16” MacBook Pro using a CalDigit Thunderbolt 4 cable……..This cable is backwards
compatible with Thunderbolt 3, USB-4, and USB-C.
Because the Thunderbolt controller on the M1 Macs seems to be different than on Intel
Macs, I will show the speed I am getting on both processor types.
Instead of BlackMagic, I will be using the AJA System Utility Light app which you can
get for free on the Mac App Store. I will be testing 4k video on a 16GB test file with
the cache turned off……and I have formatted each drive to APFS.
As you can see from the initial test results on the 16” MacBook pro, all of these thunderbolt
drives performed exceptionally well and, actually, very similar to each other. There are really
just a few MBps difference between each of these drives running around 2100MBps write
and 2400MBps read.
I was a bit surprised by how close they all were to each other but let’s take a look
at the other results for more info. …..
When using the MacBook Pro M1 you can see a dramatic drop in write speed for all of
the drives but what is interesting is that the read speeds actually increased 2-300 MBps
on all of the drives. From my test, the G-Drive Mobile Pro lost the least amount of write
speed when connected to the M1 and I re-ran the test on all drives to verify.
The write speed drop on the M1 Macs is exactly what I have been seeing in all of my tests
on the M1 for the last 6 months and looking around the internet it seems pretty universal.
It’s a hefty drop and I tested it multiple times, so….something to think about.
….
Now running a single test will only give you part of the story. As you use solid state
disks, they have a potential to heat up and slow down so I also ran an extended 10 minute
test on the 16” MacBook Pro by setting the AJA utility to run continuously. After 10
minutes of running, I checked the speed and the temperature of the drives………
The Read speed of all the drives had only minor changes but, as expected, there was
a write penalty on the thunderbolt SSDs after they were used for a few minutes straight.
I will get to the OWC drive in just a moment, but first let’s look at how much write performance
we lost.
Starting with the Samsung X5 we saw a write speed of 2200MBps initially on the 16” MacBook
pro and that plummeted down to about 780MBps after 10 minutes. A loss of about 65%. …….The
G-Drive did better losing about 32% going from about 2100MBps to around 1400MBps which
is still better than the LaCie which went from about 2100MBps to 1000MBps …..at around
a 50% loss.
The OWC drive, on the other hand, actually did something a bit different, and surprising……
After running the same 10-minute test on the OWC Envoy Pro FX, I didn’t lose a single
MBps. Both tests showed a write speed of 2100 which is pretty amazing.
Just to reiterate, I did double check all of these tests and even triple checked some.
And in case you are wondering, longer tests on the M1 MacBook Pro bore similar results
to the intel 10-minute test. The drives with the fastest speeds after the 10-minute test
also had a cooler temperature leading me to believe that thermal dissipation helped the
OWC and G-Drive.
Now, I don’t think there is a clear winner here because the best Thunderbolt SSD is going
to depend on a couple of things. Do you want a 5-year warranty?...........Do you have an
intel or m1 mac?........and is your workflow mostly short bursts or longer and require
constant data transfer?
I think that if you are running an M1 Mac, the G-Drive Mobile Pro is going to be the
fastest Thunderbolt SSD for you….it comes with a 5-year warranty and even did pretty
well on the extended test.
If you are running an Intel Mac, or still have one in your workflow, the OWC Envoy Pro
FX is probably going to surprise you with its sustained performance. It’s cheaper
than the G-Drive by about $50 but only has a 3-year warranty.
If you absolutely need a rugged, compact drive that looks like it can take some abuse go
with the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro and test out that 5 year warranty. But it’s going to
cost you another $50.
As for the Samsung X5, I just don’t think I can recommend it over any of the others
at this time, but I would like to know what you think about these tests. Are you in the
market to add some fast storage to your ailing mac, or do you have a project that needs that
extra boost of speed? Let me know below. If you are curious what Apple devices I am using
today then check out this video right over here…..its good! Hit the thumbs up button
if you liked it, hit subscribe if you want and I’ll see you next time.