Fantom Drives Extreme 2TB External SSD - 2800MB/s, Thunderbolt 3 and 4, USB Type-C, Aluminum, 3D NAND TLC, TB3X-2300N2TB

Works perfect, I benched the speed also and its pretty high as advertised. The speed it self when you transfer huge projects files its really fast ! Its expensive tho but if you got the money, worth it !

This TBT3 drive is fast. Love the extreme speed I get out of this ext drive. Windows 10 Pro on Intel NUC 10 i7. Runs fairly warm but the performance is amazing. Worth the $$$ but not cheap.

Set the FD drive up for my new Time Machine to my mid 2020 iMac Thunderbolt 3. Just plug and go. Fast! Had to use it to restore my iMac after a memory failure required a complete wipe disc, and reinstall Big Sur. Getting my apps and data that use 400gb was quick! Less than 20 minutes. Getting another one for expansion. My iMac only has a 500gb SSD.

I bought this product to use during an upgrade from MacOs High Sierra to Monterey, but unfortunately the Thunderbolt firmware on High Sierra was too old. It could recognise the drive on the Thunderbolt bus, but couldnt mount the disk. Once I had upgraded to Monterey the disk worked perfectly!

Very fast, but the include cable is just too short.

Perfect for an audio drive

Fantom offered the exact same drive, with 2-day shipping, for a total of $424.00. The price was based on a 10% off sale (of which they seem to have on a frequent basis). Hence, I bought the 2TB eXtreme Pro Thunderbolt 3 drives directly from the vendor. For those who absolutely must have Seagate or WD drives, realize that each 2TB drive (I purchased two) has the PNY brand Gen 4 XLR8 CS3040 M.2 NVMe 2TB SSD drive, which has been reviewed by PC Magazine as being not only significantly faster than the aforementioned TB 3 SSDs, but are rated for 2-million hours (MTBF); that’s 500,000 hours more than most. Like other similar drives, it has the same 5-year warranty. I once fell into the “It’s gotta be a Seagate or WD SSD!” camp, and only bought LaCie drives. I changed my mind after researching Internet sites and watching a number of YouTube videos that declared the PNY CS3040 to have superior throughput in comparison to the popular LaCie model and others, based on its excellent on-board controller. Reviews are one thing, but real-life tests are another: I was surprised to find that the Fantom drives had faster Read/Write numbers than the internal Seagate in my LaCie. The LaCie Ruuged TB3 SSD was almost as fast in the Read mode, but was noticeably slower in the Write mode(?). The Fantoms are faster than the internal Seagate M.2 NVMe SSD in my mid 2020 iMac i9 27-inch 5K 72GB RAM | 5700XT(16GB) GPU. While some might consider it a downside, I actually appreciate the heft and somewhat larger build of these portable drives. Location video shoots can be rough on equipment. These drives get warm, as expected, but thanks to the solid aluminum chassis with recessed heat sink ”fins,” they do not get near as hot as the USB C half-speed (1050 MB/s) drives I used to use on my video camera. Perhaps that’s why they last for 2-million hours. Did I mention that the Torrance, California built 2TB Fantom drive costs less than its portable LaCie and SanDisk/G-Drive counterparts? (Note: the 1 TB version of the same drive uses the ubiquitous WD M.2 NVMe 1TB SSD drive).

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 dont know exactly what drive is in this enclosure since I havent 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 dont 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 Ive 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. Thats OK though- got it on a very good sale, it is fast enough and with a 5 year warranty, its hard to go wrong.

Right out of the box, this drive actually appears to exceed the manufacturer’s quoted performance metrics for sequential read and writes speeds. Was a pleasant surprise! It is literally a solid chunk of black metal. Very high quality physical fit and finish with very high quality performance. It’s about the size of a deck of cards but feels heavy and solid in the hand. Mine stays put, tucked away just out of sight on top of my iMac Pro’s base. Using this drive as primary cache/scratch media storage for an iMac Pro assistant station in a post-production facility. It runs at 90%+ capacity, 24/7 and the performance and reliability have been absolutely top notch. Makes 4K DPX and EXR image sequences feel like ProRes on an edit timeline.

Tested on an M1 Mac Mini. Couldnt be happier. Bought the 256 GB storage mini and this is my 1 TB external drive for everything else.