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

These are good drives when someone doesn’t swap out the SSD from inside. Received the drive. No issues same speed but found out weeks after receiving that the SSD was swapped out inside for another manufacturers drive. Guess that’s what you get when the drive goes unexpectedly on sale.

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.

Sturdily built. Bit of a problem dragging and dropping to standard USB.

Fantastic little device. 3x my workflow speed.

I have struggled for years to find a reliable and fast back-up system that would play nice with my Time Machine. Other drives were large (not really portable), and my operating system consistently had trouble finding them. Well, no more. Kudos to Fantom Drives Extreme 2TB External SSD - you are reliable, fast, extremely portable, and a breeze to use.

I liked the size and storage. It must have a power supply.

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.

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.

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

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.