“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!