“External drives are starting to crop up using the mSATA interface, a smaller, card-sized interface that’s similar in form factor to the Mini PCI Express interface,” David Gewirtz reports for ZDNet. “In this review, we take one such tiny drive for a spin, er, access.”
“The drive I bought is the 256GB OTG (which stands for On The Go) from MyDigitalSSD. I picked mine up from Amazon for about $90,” Gewirtz reports. “My use case is relatively simple. I have a 2012 Mac mini (server version) with two 256GB SSDs installed. One of the SSDs runs OS X and the other runs Windows. Because this is an active use machine, 256GB just isn’t enough storage for the OS X side, so rather than yanking out a working install, I decided to add an external drive.”
MyDigitalSSD’s 256GB OTG external SSD
“It’s tiny… It doesn’t require an external cable and connects to the computer via USB 3.0,” Gewirtz reports. “Overall, it’s a great little drive and very convenient. I’ll probably pick up a few more over time as replacements for some of my thumb drives. The fact that it gets its power from USB and runs substantially faster than internal hard drives means this form factor will prove very useful in a variety of situations.”
Read more – and see the benchmarks – in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: With prices where they are now, it’s past time for us to start replacing these 7200RPM external drives that we use for Time Machine on our various Macs!
The USB 3.0 micro-B connector is notoriously unreliable and entirely unsuited for portable drives that are frequently connected and disconnected. Hopefully USB-C connectors will be better.
I’m thoroughly confused.
It doesn’t require an external cable and connects to the computer via USB 3.0. Here’s another view showing it on its side…
…Which shows where a USB cable would be connected to the SSD drive. So no cable HOW?!
Configuration was simple. Open the box. Plug it in.
So, open the Mac Mini and plug in the SSD drive? Huh? plug it into what? There’s a USB 3.0 connector inside a 2012 Mac Mini? And there’s room inside that model of a Mac Mini server to fit an ‘external’ drive? What am I missing here?
Looks to me like they’re using it as an external drive through USB on the SSD and mini. By “doesn’t require an external cable” I can only assume the writer means it doesn’t need to be plugged into the wall, since it gets its electricity through USB.
What you described obviously makes sense. I hope that’s what he meant.
Fine for often-used drives, like Time Machine, but remember SSDs are not suited for archive storage (kept offline or offsite), as bit memory degrades if the drive isn’t powered up every now and then. Happens faster in hotter environments
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2920727/leaving-unpowered-ssds-in-a-warm-room-can-kill-your-data-fast.html
Time to make Thunderbolt drives more affordable.
If your Mac has a high-speed SD card slot, consider using an “SDXC” card instead. It’s even smaller and barely sticks out of the slot during use. It’s quite fast, fast enough to be used as a secondary startup disk (after reformatting for Mac). The price is now well under $100 for a 256GB SDXC card (there’s one from PNY for right now for $80 on Amazon). You don’t tie up a USB port, AND there’s nothing dangling off your Mac.
I have a 128GB SDXC card in my Mac mini’s high-speed SD card slot. Have a “mostly clean” OS X system system installed on it for testing purposes. I bought last year when the price fell below $50. I plan to get a 256GB SDXC card after its price goes below $50.
Yes, this is one of the reasons I hope Apple isn’t ditching the SD slot. I’m afraid they are. But I love these drives. I use a 128 GB Jet Drive Lite for Google Drive and Drop Box (both for work). Love them. They also have some of these things that can be combined logically with your internal drive to form a single logical volume.