“The OverDrive Thunderbolt performed consistently well in our suite of real-world tests and synthetic benchmarks,” Albert Filice writes for Macworld.
“This isn’t entirely surprising given the 1TB capacity (SSDs tend to offer better performance as the storage capacity increases) and accompanying $1000 price tag (you get what you pay for),” Filice writes, “a dollar per GB isn’t outrageous for a portable SSD right now, and at 1TB there aren’t many others to choose from.”
Filice writes, “With so few portable SSDs sporting a terabyte of capacity, the OverDrive Thunderbolt stands out, in a good way.”
Read more in the full review, with benchmarks, here.
Elegant, but OWC has 1T-Thunderbolt $200.
Which one?
My mistake, that one is not SSD …
OWC sells a 960GB 2.5″ SATA SSD for $649.
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDEX3G960/
Yes, but as a side note, this would need to be placed into a USB 3.0 or an external thunderbolt kit if there is one.
The Monster SSD, is already external and Thunderbolt making the Read/Write operation faster than USB 3.0.
The 2nd thing I’ll note: This OWC disk is 3G specifying that read writes are at 250MBs. The monster specs up to 550MBs.
Granted tests were done, it leads me to believe that this is a 6G disk.
Excellent points. I almost always find external drive kits to be over-priced.
As for the drives: Again, you get what you pay for when you’re on the bleeding edge. And you’re paying a lot.
SSDs are a blast to work with, so long as you don’t have a spinning hard drive anywhere in the way to slow things down.
Slightly off topic, but a case in point: I had a MacBook Air (2013 model) with a bad LCD. To help out the user, I wanted to move all of their data to a backup MBA (exact same vintage).
My setup was pretty cool but simple. Using a MacBook Pro with Retina display that has two thunderbolt ports, I hooked them both into my MBP and had them both in target disk mode. Careful next step was to make sure I knew which was which, but using disk utility I restored the good MBA’s HD with the bad one’s disk image . . . moved about a 60 gb disk image in something like 7 minutes.
Bam. Handed the “new” MBA to the user and it was like they had the old machine in every single way.
The speed is amazing! Dude thought I was some kind of computer sorcerer.
> SSDs are a blast to work with, so long as you don’t have a spinning hard drive anywhere in the way to slow things down.
The Fusion Drive is a very elegant compromise IMHO. It gave my aging iMac and MBP another few years.
Also slightly off topic, I just had a massive fail in my Late 2012 MacBook Air. The (Samsung) SSD just stopped working and ended up having 100’s of bad blocks. They believe the controller went bad.
Was able to save some data, but not all of it.
I remembered at the time that a few weeks prior to that I had an error message pop up at home that my Time Capsule was out of space or couldn’t connect or something like that and I was too busy and ignored it. So I didn’t have anywhere near a complete backup. What an idiot I know, right?
Was the 500GB SSD as well $1000 to replace, didn’t qualify for replacement, and the Apple store guys, and a separate AAD I took it to for a 2nd opinion, couldn’t understand why it had failed. But I was out of warranty and out of luck.
I had always thought of SSD’s as a relatively failure-free sort of media, especially in comparison to a rotating hard drive. Not necessarily the case.
Bought a new MacBook Pro, with another smaller SSD as I could not afford a larger one, and bought a much smaller replacement drive for the old MacBook Air which I will now sell.
I haven’t played with SSDs. But I know some disk tools have been successful at restoring them. Their technology is not the same as hard drives, but much of how the drive interacts with disk tools is the same. GRC’s SpinRite is one example. Sadly, it remains Windows only unless you’re willing to go through contortions.
From my reading and understanding, there are a couple major ways a drive can lose track of data or simply stop writing it specific individual bits on the drive. Meanwhile, SSD tech has been progressing into superior lifespans and data retention. The more recent the tech, the more expensive the drive.
One place to start learning details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ssd
Always back up anything you store on an SSD. When they fail, there is often little that can be done to recover data. My backup strategy employs a variety of automated backups (Time Machine + Deja Vu) to spinning hard drives in multiple locations. When the SSD in my 2011 MB Air died in June, all I had to do was order a replacement and restore from the most convenient backup.
Yes. Buy a NAS. Be backed up for life….
And buy a real one… not one of those 2 disk Lacie.