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

Great external drive for my MacBook Pro. Uses Thunderbolt 3 for super fast speeds. Packaging said it was formatted for Mac but it was formatted for Windows. Easily fixed w/Macs Disk Utility. Once formatted, its been flawless.

Wow - this fast SSD gave me a brand new 2017 iMac. Cant believe I waited to do this.

Love editing in FCPX with this little guy attached to my M1 MBP. super fast and works well! I then back this up to my home server and also backblaze.

I needed an external drive for my mac mini (which only came with 256 gig, it was an emergency buy). This one feels as if it is an internal drive. I had trouble with stability with other external SSD drives. This one works great, also when doing heavier stuff with final cut where even for very small projects hundreds of gig are required. I only use it for a day now (including video editing for a night) but it is a relief to be on a stable harddrive.

Just what we needed!

I purchased this external drive to become the new primary / boot drive for my mid-2017 27” iMac. When I purchased my iMac five years ago, it came with a Fusion drive (small SDD and slow 5400rpm traditional HDD). Fast forwarding to present day, I found the Fusion drive getting slower and I wasn’t keen on removing the screen of the iMac to replace the old Fusion drive. Since my iMac supports Thunderbolt 3, this external drive is faster than the Fusion drive. Following a tutorial I found via internet search, I mirrored the contents from the old drive to this new external one with minimal effort and then set it as the boot drive the system. My five year old iMac now boots faster and applications launch faster… likely adding a few more years of life to my iMac before I ultimately replace it. Write speeds are more than double the old drive, and read speeds are close to double when I ran benchmarks on the old and new drives.

I purchased this because I didn’t like the idea of having my personal information on the internal drive of my Mac Mini - because that SSD is a permanent part of the motherboard. If you have to send your computer off to be repaired, everything that is on the internal drive will likely become the property of the person fixing it. Therefore, I don’t like keeping that information trapped on that drive. This is the same for any MacBook as well. I configured this as a bootable drive, and it works every bit as well as the internal SSD. In fact, this drive benchmarks essentially with identical specs as the OEM Apple internal 1TB SSD. TB3 is fantastic. I imagine you can install another drive in the enclosure as well. There are numerous 3rd gen drives that are faster and have better MTBF numbers than the WD Black, although it’s a proven and reliable drive in its own right.

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.

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!

I have set up my 2019 iMac (w Fusion Drive) to boot from the Thunderbolt 3 Fantom Drive externally. This was easy and does everything I hoped for. BlackMagic Disk Speed test reports 2350 MB/sec write (faster than competitors advertise for their up to speeds) and 2570 MB/sec read. Not running hot. I was reticent to buy from a non-major brand but so far couldnt be happier.