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

I am not one to give bad reviews normally... But I bought two drives from Fantom. A 2Tb and a 4TB. I have had NO problem with the 2TB drive but am having issues with the 4TB drive. It keeps disconnecting from my Mac and sometimes even my restarts my computer. I contacted Fantom and they said it was approved for replacement. There was some delay due to them moving buildings, so it took longer than anticipated. That wasnt a big issue. The bigger issue is that they said they couldnt duplicate the issue. We went back and forth a few times, through email, and they said that it was approved for replacement anyway. When I got it back, it was formatted APFS Case Sensitive, which is fine but this was not the way it was formatted from the factory. I did this when I bought the drive. I also called the drive FD. This drive was also called FD. (I cannot recall what it was called brand new for either of my two drives). Im convinced that this was not replaced and they sent me the same one back mainly because Im seeing the same issues I had with the one I sent back for replacement within 24 hours of using the drive. I have 4 other drives connected to this computer and dont have any issues. Even when I sent the 4TB Fantom back for replacement, I connected my 2TB Fantom and it had been working flawless. Once the 4TB came back, I disconnected the 2TB and put the 4TB in its place. I have, once again, responded back to the email to see if they will really replace this time. I will update this review accordingly once I get the response back.

Wow! This thing is fast! Purchased this to optimize the timemachine transfer from my 2017 core i7 MacBook Pro to my new 2023 M2 Max Mackbook Pro. When I first got it I benchmarked it on my 2017 MBP with Blackmagic connected via Thunder Bolt 3 and got 2.5 GB/s read and 2.3 GB/s write. Reformates it from HFS+ to APFS to optimize it for timemachine and re ran the benchmark with the same results. Very happy. Ran timemachine to it and with in an hour my 800GB Backup was completed. Went to restore the new M2 Max MBP from the backup and I was up and running in 30min! As you can see in the photo it was transferring at 2.02 GB/s couldn’t be happier!

The SSD on my 2 year old iMac started going bad and I am now using this device as a boot drive. Works great!

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).

Wasnt initially impressed with the benchmarks, then I read the owners manual (make sure you do) and there were a few things that needed to be done in windows 10 to unlock the full speed. After that I ran benchmarks and got soeeds better than advertised. I also did some windows tweeks to improve performance for audio latency and that seemed to imorovr speeds even more. By the time I was done optimizing Windows 10 I was able to transfer a 90GB sample library from my Sabrent Rocket 4.0 NVME internal drive to the Fantom Drives Thunderbolt 3 external in under a minute, and that contained thousands of small files whicj are usually the slowest to copy. Fast and a very solid vuild quality.

Just what we needed!

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!

After using this for a few weeks now, Im 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 Im 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 ssds. Ive 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 ssds, 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. Im kind of glad i clicked on a social media ad for once.

For the purpose of operating on both my Mac and iPad, this drive is small and fast.

Small and of good quality and super solid. I would recommend to anyone looking for a fast SSD drive.