20 Best External Hard Drives For Photographers (2023 Updated)

Got 3 18TB mybooks for a crazy low price each from the wd store (dunno how I got that price, maybe the store was screwed up that day but I jumped). They are simple to plug in, fast, and you can disable sleep mode.

The only thing about the 18TB versions are they are LOUD. They do click/make a noise every 5 seconds (one is a click when the drive does it’s 5 second access because something in the case is lose and you can tell it’s the top plastic piece making the click).

All of the mybooks are designed to make a noise every 5 seconds to “lubricate” stuff according to the faq here. The extra warranty making them have a 4 year warranty was even better. OH and these are 7200RPM drives in the case, probably white label red’s.

I also have 4 14’s and one of those is 7200 (the rest are 5400) so i would guess it’s a crap shoot what they decide to slap in there but my 18’s are 7200 and fast over usb 3. 1. If I see the low offer show up again I’m going to get one more and max out my drive letters.

I find these more reliable than the brand that starts with see and ends with gate (the warranty on those is a year and they stuff in enterprise class drives where if you bought them bare you get a 3 year warranty and they wont honor the drive S/N, just the chassis SN).

I don’t know how WD handles shucked drives (none of mine are shucked) but I read that they dont complain and replace them. I’ll stick with WD, never had much trouble with them. Again, they’re fast, long warranty and the only complaint is they’re noisy but what can you do.

You can’t go wrong with the brand, quality or price.

Great product. Affordable, always on sale, good speeds for both gaming and digital media. Always trust B&H with my purchases. Can’t go wrong here. Still not convinced? (Read More. ) Noise scale: 3/5 Speed: 3/5 Reliability: 5/5 Stop wasting hundreds on handfuls of smaller drives and pick this up.

You’re getting quality security and storage for a great value. Speeds are good enough for most tasks and can handle a lot of rewrites thanks to WD’s amazing track record of reliability. Tips: (Windows Users) Consider formatting from FAT32 to NTFS to ensure your data/bits stay healthy.

Use USB 3. 0 for best speeds. Avoid WD Cloud service. Use a 20 digit password. Always use a quality power strip or surge protector. Consider buying a hardcase with foam inserts. This device may draw a moderate wattage from USB – be aware, this may add to battery drain on older/smaller devices.

Important: Avoid hibernate/sleep/lock device when committing large file operations or erasures/formats. With password enabled, the encrypted drive may sleep or lock down in these power-related events.

This may also cause issues if you lock device when wiping free space, MFT, or when formatting partitions. Programs may attempt to modify the drive in background and can cause problems.

If you are going to use this device with a Mac, you (may) need to contact WD technical support to guide you through reformatting prior to use. The reformatting process is logical, but can not be installed using the internal Mac disc utilities, you will need to install WD’s download and use tech support to help make this a quick and easy process.

This device, ( of which i purchased two) an 18TB My Book, will be used here as back up to my 48TB G Raid 4 bay Shuttle. I do not use the cloud for storage and would prefer to house my own back up. My digital life began with an ever increasing number of By Book’s in the 1990’s, and then migrated everything to G Drive storage.

What I have done now, in this purchase is consolidate 12 G drives into, 1 48 TB G 4bay shuttle and 2- 18 TB My Book drives to bring of my storage needs up to date, with space available for adding data for a few years to come.

This series of recent purchases represents my continued loyalty and trust in the performance reliability of products from WD for well over two decades.

I got a new Surface Laptop Studio together with this drive. The problem I’m having with it that when I attempt to save directly to this drive, it crashes my software (Adobe Illustrator), it crashes Windows Explorer (Windows 11), and sometimes crashed the PC.

It took me a minute to get an opinion on why this is happening. I believe it is simply because when the drive is idle for a while, it shuts off. And when I try to save directly to it, its not there. It wakes up quickly, but not quick enough for the system to crash.

Also, when it’s asleep, I can navigate to the drive inside Windows Explorer and get a message that the drive is not there, momentarily, then suddenly, the drive is there. So it looks to me like the problem is that the drive shuts off.

This may be because the drive is powered by the USB-C port on the laptop. Lastly, I sort of noticed that there was an optional driver update in Windows Updates for a Western Digital drive. I kind of hoping/wondering that Windows has noticed the problem and that this is a fix, but that’s probably wishful thinking.

I haven’t had a chance to test whether this problem is fixed or not. But the drive is not going to serve me in the way I intended if I can’t save directly to it at any time. Other considerations that I have not explored is whether the laptop was on battery or plugged in when this was happening.

I remember plugging it in after quickly running out of battery life but I can’t remember when the crashes were occurring. But I lost a couple hours of work. I had to start saving to the desktop then moving to this drive.

On June 16th, 2022 I purchased a LaCie Rugged Mini 5TB USB-C Portable Hard Drive. I was embarking on a 12 week photographic tour of outback Australia and I needed a portable HDD to store my photographs.

I am using a MacBook Pro. I set up the LaCie with folder for each location I was visiting and making it easy to downland and edit photos whilst travelling. I use Adobe Lightroom / Adobe Photoshop for this purpose.

less than 2 weeks after commencing my trip and downloading some images, the LaCie became corrupted and folders containing and folders contains images I had downloaded simply disappeared and there is no trace.

Even some of the folders that I hade created and downloaded images into but had had not worked on, just disappeared. I contacted Seagate as I believed they would provide a rescue plan to recover this lost images.

Firstly I was connected to a technician whose English was so poor I could not understand her. What I could understand is that they need to disc back and it will take 12 to 16 weeks to see if the data is recoverable.

This is a complete waste of time as I am on the road travelling, not HDD to download the images onto. If this is the level of support offered by Seagate then I will move to another brand of portable HDD.

Overall, the technical support offers is pathetic and I am left without a portable HDD to store my images. When I return home, I will be returning the LaCie for a full refund, not a replacement as Seagate are not a company I wish to ever deal with again.

Problems right from the start. Unpacked, plugged in, clicked “Start Here” for Windows, Toolkit installed and then the drive was never seen again in Windows. Shutdown computer, restarted, nope. no drive.

Tried several restarts and using different USB ports and cables. Nope. DOA. Going right in the box. This was my first and will be my last Lacie product. How can a company sell a product that fails immediately? Statistically, if it happened to one person who was a first time Lacie customer, then mathematically it has to be happening to a lot of users.

That statistic is a huge flag for quality or product quality control. I say all of this from the perspective of an IT person with many years of experience.

First the good: read speeds are quite good, with Diskmark posting 152Mbps for sequential. Unfortunately, the write speed is flat out unacceptable, posting at 56Mbps compared to my WD 5Tb portable drive that posts 114Mbps.

I’m a video professional and generate large files (10+Gb) on my cameras, and getting them into my system in a timely manner is crucial to my work flow. When I copied files onto this Seagate drive, I was getting a real world rate closer to 20Mbps, which is less than half the read speed of the SDHC cards coming out of my cameras.

My cards were putting out data more than twice as fast as the hard drive could take it! Plus, the packaging was a HUGE cardboard backing (marked “C**tco” BTW) with a small plastic bubble with the drive and cable mounted on it.

Needed a very large box to ship it, and now to return it. Wasteful. In the words of the Food Network, “For these reasons we had to chop you. ” Drive returned.

The drive is formatted in exFAT. According to Seagate’s website: “exFAT is a lightweight file system compatible with all versions of Windows and modern versions of macOS. exFAT is not compatible or recommended for built-in backup utilities such as File History (Windows) and Time Machine (macOS).

exFAT is not a journaled file system, which means it can be more susceptible to data corruption when errors occur or the drive is not disconnected properly from the computer. You can optimize file copy performance by formatting the drive in the native file system for your computer operating system.

” This information is ONLY found on their website not in the included instructions. I wish I had known this BEFORE I backed up my data to a “lightweight file system. ” The drive itself is 3. 6Tb usable.

The build quality appears to be quite good and the performance is typical for a USB drive.

I’ve been using Seagate drives for many years. I’ve only had a 40GB drive go on me with all the Seagate drives that I’ve used. Hopefully this will be just as reliable. This empty drive provides Writing transfer speeds of 1.

04Gbps on a Xbox series X. I wa getting just over 800Mbps on a WD Black external hard drive. My WD Black portable 5TB Gaming Drive is over 50% full. I picked up this drive for $99 on sale. My WD Black 4TB version is $130 on sale.

Both drives have similar transfer speeds. You can’t go wrong for the price on this hard drive.

Pros: – Lots of storage for cheap, best budget option I can find in the current chip shortage market. – Internally has the Seagate Barracuda Compute 6TB SMR Drive, which costs more than this external version.

– External power used, so good for small devices like Raspberry Pi 4 used as a Plex server. Comes with like 5 or more plug sockets for the adapter. Cons: – Only 1 year warranty. – This is an SMR technology hard drive, designed for back-up once, read many, so is ideal for storing photos, music, movies, etc.

, Not good for a server, or using as main drive or primary OS / Windows drive. – Write speeds are on the slow side, I was getting between 40 MB/s and 125 MB/s, it fluctuates as it is SMR and slows down when cache fills up.

My average speed was around 80 MB/s. Took around 12 hours to fill up a 1. 9 TB / 5. 55 TB of the storage. – I DO NOT recommend buying SMR Drives over 8TB, as it takes way too long to fill up the whole thing.

I’ve seen some mixed reviews on this device and thought – hey, maybe I’ll get one of the lucky ones! It certainly has great value for money, and it does indeed plug in and become recognised by the computer.

It seems compact and you can absolutely store a lot of data on this drive. however, there seems to be something off with this device. It’ll recognize your data, but it seems to excessively spin down and not initiate the motor after a certain amount of time.

It will transfer your data for about 10-30 seconds or so at fairly decent speeds for an external drive (~60-100/mbps) but then all of a sudden it will dive, and no data will transfer. Sometimes I’m lucky and it’ll start up again after 30-90 seconds, but most of the time it will error out and say that it can’t find your data anymore.

Very sad, thought it was a good value, but ultimately it turned out to be too good to be true. I’ll be returning this device under Officework’s excellent return policy and under Australian Consumer Laws with a different (albeit slightly smaller) device.

I placed this drive on top of a stack of books about 9 inches high. I connected the cord it came with and went to plug it to my Surface Pro. Apparently, the Surface was a little too far for the cord and I ended up pulling the cord enough for the drive to come with it.

What followed was a pretty hard thud, enough for me to be concerned about the drive. I cleared my desk and plugged in the drive only to find 300GB of files wiped out. Luckily, I’m using this drive as a backup, so nothing was actually lost.

As I tried to eject it, a notification popped up preventing me from ejecting. This was new to me, as I am able to eject without any issues. I unplugged the drive anyway and upon re-plugging, a notification popped up saying the entire drive is corrupted and needs to be repaired, which I am in the process of doing.

Great. For $100, I’d expect the quality of this hard drive to be a little better. If you are looking to buy a hard drive, please be take extra care into it when to open it out of the box.

Great price compared to replacing the hard drive on my old passport which was only good for one drop. Hopefully I won’t drop this one. It’s interesting how a replacement parts cost more than a complete new item.

One important thing that the instructions do not tell you is how to use it with an old computer running Window XP or other 32 bit Windows GUI. Old versions of Windows will not read this drive because it is formatted for the newer file system.

The fix is simple but requires the use of another computer which is newer. You must download the reformatting software, wd quick formatter, from the Western Digital website and run it to easily reformat the drive with the proper file system for older versions of Windows.

The reformatting is quick and easy but wipes out the ability to have a secure partition unless you add one yourself later. Now before someone cries that you shouldn’t be running old operating systems here are a few reasons why people buy these drive to use with old computers: 1, to transfer files from their old computer to their new one.

2, to use with old computers which people need to run expensive software or hardware which can not run on newer systems and use these computers exclusively for that use.

Purchased to augment an Xbox One gaming setup already supplemented with a 4TB traditional HD. Seemed to me as if load times were constantly growing on certain games to the point that I was staring at load screens more often than playing.

Checked some sites and settled on this SSD and it’s worth every cent. Shifted a couple of long-loading games onto this credit-card-sized beauty and watched load times drop around 75-80% across the board – with the exception of server connections, can’t do anything about that.

Runs cool and utterly silent. Has made the agony of load times much more bearable, and transferring larger games went quickly. Did not run a formal speed test but the improvement is undeniable. Anyone on the fence, dive in – while it won’t hold your whole library, it’ll hold 10-15 moderately-sized games easily enough and you can transfer games to and from this drive seamlessly.

It’s a no-brainer!.

I’ve had a few of these drives and for the most part they are great. Small, fast, and easy to carry, etc. But out of all my SSD drives (and there’s a small pile at this point) my 3ish year old T5 just died – first ever SSD to die on my too.

It had a few issues connecting one day and next day it died. What was frusterating about this, was that I used it to bring a project with me on a trip and I was working from the drive directly – the drive showed no issues, connected just fine and when I was done, I saved the quite.

Then, I boot the drive back up about 20 minutes later and get a warning that the drive could be read but not written to and I needed to back it up immediately. OK fine, but then I noticed that the only content available to backup was from an older folder over a week old.

In short, from what I understand, the cellular structure of the drive malfunctioned and instantly either lost or hid all recent work that would have been written to it. In the end I lost a night’s worth of work, and got a bit of a cold sweat when I realized that my entire setup is built on SSDs for projects and HDDs for backups, so if that’s how an SSD dies.

Then I need to be double sure my projects are all backed up properly cause there’s no recovery or going back. As a side note, both my original t3 drives are still going strong! I think the whole line is actually pretty great, but be careful with your data.

This is a wonderful external drive. I own three of them and also three of the older, 2TB drives with Thunderbolt and Micro-USB 3. 0 connections. All have proved to be absolutely reliable and fast enough for simultaneous playback of multiple high-resolution videos.

I haven’t tried dropping one onto a concrete sidewalk from the top of a tall building, but the orange bumper around the drive certainly provides plenty of protection against ordinary wear and tear. (As I said, I’ve never had one fail.

) The bumper also provides good friction, so that the drive will sit on any surface without slipping. It also means there’s no need to keep the drive in a separate case. Lacie originally made drives predominantly for MACs, and those who used the older drives may have experience some minor inconvenience installing them on PCs.

But these new drives are completely plug-and-play. Also, on the older drives, the orange bumper extended too close the USB socket, so that the connection was not perfectly tight. This has also been corrected on the newer modes.

Overall, a great drive.

I normally buy Seagate External Hard drives, but I know so many photographers that swear by these! I bought two of them at the beginning of wedding season because I didn’t want to be caught up in editing mid-wedding season and run out of space on my current external hard drives.

Well, here we are mid August and I just opened one, formatted it for my computer OS, and began backing up files. Almost immediately I started experiencing problems. The hard drive kept disconnecting, then re-connecting, then disconnecting again without me touching anything or even moving the desk.

As some one who works in Lightroom directly off of my external hard drives, it wouldn’t even stay connected long enough to create a new Lightroom catalog for it. Needless to say it is impossible to work off of.

Sadly in an attempt to be prepared, I ordered so long ago that both drives are no longer refundable. I just sticking to what works next time. I have never had a problem with Seagate drives and will be working off of them from here on out.

I bought this knowing nothing about external hard drives and wanting to transfer my old mac data to a new one using Time Machine. It was easy to set up and it was also clear in the instructions on how to use it.

It even said on the packaging that I would want to reformat the drive to use time machine. I only had a little over 200+ GB to move onto the drive and it didn’t take very long. I just took a small break, came back and it was done.

Would recommend this! I also like the orange rugged case 🙂 Although I haven’t transferred my data to my new mac yet (haven’t gotten it yet), I feel like it will be a smooth transition.

The SanDisk is supposed to attain up to 2000MB/s with a USB 3. 2 Gen 2×2 port. My MacBook Air M1 has Thunderbolt/USB4 ports (40BS/s), but they downshift to USB3. 1 (10GB/s) with this drive. (This happens with other USB3.

2 drives, too, so it’s an Apple thing, not SanDisk. ) With the Mac seeing it as USB3. 1, it achieves read/write speeds of about 750/680MB/s. (Yes, a bit faster writing than reading. ) That seems slow, but I got essentially the same results with a 2000MB/s Intel SSD in an Acacis case, so the Mac may just be slow when dealing with these more-than-3.

1-but-less-than-4. 0 drives. Disappointing, indeed, but there may be good technical reasons for it. Speed aside, it is not much bigger than a fat credit card, and gets only mildly warm with normal use.

It comes with an unusual one-orientation only C-to-A adapter and a 6inch C-to-C cable. I use the ‘finger hole’ in the drive case to suspend it with a piece of wire from a hole in the protective case I have on the Mac.

That takes at least some of the stress off the C connection.

I purchased the 2TB version of this as part of a recent daily deal. I have a couple other similar drives from Samsung that have worked flawlessly and found this offering as an additional option for a video editing drive for my M1 MacBook Air.

The extent to which I have used it to date has been to copy video and project file onto it from my smaller 1TB Samsung drive and to do some preliminary work. The files copied fine and so far the drive has worked well for editing.

One concern I do have however, and the reason for 4 rather than 5 stars is that during the bulk file copy, the drive became very hot to touch. While it kept working fine, the heat it generated was a bit disconcerting as neither of my other external SSD drives had ever gotten this hot.

I found several online posting regarding the same concern about this drive. I would think that prolonged heat would have a detrimental effect to the life of the drive. So in the end the drive is working fine, and I will keep working with it, but time will tell if the heat becomes an issue.

I purchased this about 8 months ago specifically to backup my files. Every attempt to use the included program, Transcend Elite, ended in failure. I resorted to just copying folders. Today I decided to search for a solution online.

Apparently everyone using Windows has this problem. Here’s what I found on the Transcend website: “The Windows system drive (C:) contains many temporary program files and hidden system folders, causing a backup failure.

If you want to back up files, we recommend manually selecting folders/files on the C: drive instead of selecting the whole C: drive. ” I decided to try Windows Backup software. This also failed. More reading online led me to another user reporting the same problem.

The tech at Transcend software told this user that they had no idea why it wasn’t working, and they should just copy folders. (1) Why bother putting out software that you know doesn’t work? (2) I depend on this drive to back up my files.

I need to know I can recovered my files if/when I need to. I will be buying a different hard drive for backup because I don’t trust this one.

I’ve owned a few of these transcend drives. Outter hard case is duravje, but the USB ports on them are NOT. they are poorly soldered and tend to fail gradually For my last purchase, it nearly cost me 1.

2TB of data. Warranty is useless at times like these. Right now I’d rather buy a more reliable generic enclosure and make my own external portable drive. No more transcend drives for me.

Well my intentions purchasing this item was to download all my files, what I felt is important into my personal storage. What I have encountered is difficulties in downloading the materials. My Laptop keeps popping up with the message that the Recovery X is not found, or when I was downloading in progress it stop and message stated that it wasn’t working or couldn’t be found.

I haven’t tried going into the laptop and figuring out what might be causing that message, nor have I gotten in contact with the companies tech line, to discuss this issue I am having. It just might be my setting, who ever reads this and is simpler, I would contact the tech line and discuss this issue I am having, so they don’t experience what I am experiencing.

Hopefully this helps before purchasing; I believe is a great idea having your own storage for your material.

first, i am a huge fan of buying from best buy ad have spent 10’s of thousand on electronics desktops drone, cameras, appliances etc anf have no dog in the hunt raring / reviewing this but this is my honest experience.

i purchased two of these externals recentl. both are very noisy with whirring and clunking sounds all the time. slows my computer down – or stops it altogether – when I am using photo processing programs or editing video.

i do not recommend this particular model hard drive. giving thought about returning them but it took SO long to transfer 8 TB it’s daunting to think about having to do it again. i am running a 27 inch, 2013 model imac desktop with 32 gb memory 3.

2 GHz corei5 using 10. 13. 6 high sierra. not stoked at all on these two at items and caution anyone who purchases them.

I probably shouldn’t write this as I’ve only used the drive for one day, given the fact that I just bought and returned the WD 10TB Elemental that died within five days. I’ve used external drives for backup for longer than I can remember, decades and this is the first one that has impressed me and the first that I can say that I could recommend.

Actual sustained write speeds over 200MB with burst rates of 239MB/s. It would drop to 130ishMB/s from time to time. But these are 200-900MB files I’m copying. Copying small files will be slower if for no other reason that the source drive can’t keep up.

The unit runs hot though. I place it on top of my tower where the cooling from the tower keeps it down to 49C when copying 5TB of data to it. It’s layed out on its side rather than standing up so its more stable but as always not enough to cat proof it.

9. 09TB is the usable data after formating to NTFS. WARNING: This is for any disk drive. DO NOT turn on Windows “allow compression of folders”!!! Your disk drive will become severly fragmented. Mine was over 70% fragmented copying files to a new drive.

Also, you’ll hear the unit chatter like a chimpmunk as the armatures are racing over the platters.

The brand new 8 TB Seagate Backup Hub I purchased from B&H Photo and Video constantly becomes undiscoverable and freezes up my brand new HP computer. So bad so that I have to force shutdowns holding down the power button even if I wasn’t trying to access the drive.

I know it’s the drive causing the problem because the problem stops if I remove the drive’s USB cord from the computer. It’s constantly crashing Photoshop Lightroom Classic to the point it’s unusable.

Seagate has a warranty, but said they will only honor that warranty by replacing my defective product with a refurbished or recertified drive. When I insisted on receiving a replacement that is new, Seagate told me they only sell new drives to retailers.

They also told me that if I run their diagnostic software to troubleshoot their defective drive, I would be responsible for the cost to retrieve any lost data. Data recovery is supposed to be part of their warranty.

I’ve been dealing Seagate customer service for well over a month now, itsa total circus. Steer very clear of these Seagate Backup Hubs.

I got the 1 in x factory defective new 10TB external drive. When I brought it home ant took it out of the box and assembled the power adapter connectors nothing came on when I plugged it in. All the adapter conne tors should be labeled as to what country you use for which one as I had to guess what the appropriate connector would be for Canada.

A big disappointment lack of trust now for Seagate and Bestbuy as I don’t feel trust to get quality working product. I may never buy a new format of external hard drive. Based in previous re iews I read I was excited to buy the 10TB DRIVE.

Best UT never even apologized or showed empathy when I brought it back just blasted out no return policy for opened drives but in end after showing being very upset did give me full refund.

The My cloud app for android automatically backs up pictures and videos. If you wish to back up other files such as music, documents, or SMS text messages, then you must use another app or complete the task manually.

The WIFI connection to the device is password protected; however, the network share uses anonymous credentials. There are scripts that can be ran from an SSH enabled prompt that modify the configuration, but there is no documentation as to which scripts improve the overall security of the device.

The SSH encryption does not require any certificates, so I suspect that the SSH protocol utilized is outdated. I personally would not place this on a network that is connected to the internet, because one of the things that I back up is PDF copies of credit card statements.

Plug it on computer or use smartphone application. Configure auto save. And now, every time you put an SD card, backup is done. I don’t really care about other features. But there are a lot of options like Plex and more.

If you use CF cards, you can enable auto save on USB port, and plug a CC reader on it. Or use an SD to CF adapter in your camera. I use it on the go, for wedding and such.

For being able to unload my video discs in the field, it’s the ONLY game in town that I was able to find. Some limitations: 1: The software on mine doesn’t give me the option to “move” and then delete the files on the inserted card.

Because of updates?? Is ok like that but means I have to erase card files in my cameras. 2: I found playback from drive to my devices very limited and delayed with buffering time. Haven’t found a way to fix that, but at least I can verify that the files are on my Hard Drive.

Something is disappointing with this product. (The actual speed vs claimed speed). I bought the Extreme Pro Portable SSD V2 4 TB (CHF499) for my iMac Pro. The SSD claims a read/write speed of 2000MB/s, which is around double the claimed speed for the previous Extreme Pro Portable SSD (not V2).

However when I plug it in to the back of my iMac Pro (Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) port to USB C on the SanDisk), the maximum speed I can get is 971MB/s write and 952. 5 MB/s read. This compares to the speeds from the very similar Samsung X5 SSD which reports 1962 MB/s Write and 2498 MB/s Read, when using the same cable and the same Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) port on my iMac Pro.

The Thunderbolt port can handle 40MB/s. so its not a failing of my hardware and the higher speeds on the Samsung x5 prove that. I googled and found the answer in a review. Here is an edited extract: “Here is something important the consumers should be aware of before buying the newer Extreme PRO Portable SSD V2.

This portable SSD doesn’t use Thunderbolt technology. Instead, it uses a USB 3. 2 Gen 2×2 interface that is capable of up to 20Gbps of transfer speed. There’s not a lot of motherboards PC (desktop/laptop) that have a USB 3.

2 Gen 2×2 interface. As far as I know, only the new motherboards based on the (also new) Intel 500 series chipset natively supports USB 3. 2 Gen 2×2 interface. So, for older systems, you will have to use a USB 3.

2 Gen 2×2 add-in-card like the SilverStone ECU06″. Simply put, The SanDisk isn’t going to work at the full speed with your 40MS/s Thunderbolt (USB-C) port. It will run only at the USB-C speed depending on which generation it is.

Most people do not have a USB 3. 2 Gen 2×2 port. For example, the Thunderbolt (USB-C) port on the iMac Pro is compatible with USB 3. 1 Gen 2 (up to 10Gb/s). Most people will only have a USB-A (USB 3.

0 maximum speed 5 Gbits/s), so if you plug it into one of those ports you will see a speed of only around 450 MB/s. So the message here is that this drive is deficient because it does NOT support Thunderbolt.

You are unlikely to have the latest USB 3. 2 Gen 2×2 on your computer, meaning that you will see speeds of less than 1000 MB/s on the new computer models and less than 500 MB/s on older models. It’s not worth paying the CHF 100 extra to get the v2 of this drive unless you really know your USB port can handle 2000 MB/s speeds.

So far this has been a great little Drive. My old backup drive was getting very slow. This backs up in about 30 seconds as compared to the 30 minutes on the old drive. Using USB-C. The only complaint we had has nothing to do with the drive but with Best Buy Rewards Certificates.

Tried to use expiring “certificates” on our purchase. This drive was $199. 99 and the Mouse we got was $99. 99. Unfortunately we did not realize that they don’t apply those points to the most costly items.

Be sure to have them ring up the item you want the certificate to go against as a separate purchase. We had to return two cords we did not need and are now left with a $40 certificate that we won’t be able to use.

We tried to use 270 certificate points on those 2 items totaling $299. 98, but because of the way they applied the points to the cords first and not on the high ticket item we lost $40. No way to get satisfaction.

Best Buy employees very nice but case of “Too bad, So sad!!”. I will never again be hooked into doing something for their rewards or certificates. Just not worth the hassle of trying to figure out how to use them.

They issue them to make you spend more money. Couldn’t use the $100 certificate for the new mouse because it was only $99. 99. Because of the $. 01 you are out of luck!! With the two items we should have been okay, but they applied the points to the small stuff first, so if anything is returned you have a costly problem.