SanDisk - Extreme 1TB External USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A/Type-C Portable Solid-State Drive

The Scan Solid State Drive is a great purchase. My laptop SSD got close to its limit. This drive seems very rigid, it light and very impressing that it can hold 1TB of data. My intent is to use this SSD for quick access requiring applications. The USB-C is also a plus since it can access the data faster. Good investment.

Recently had an issue with a WD passport 1GB external drive and wanted to have a faster, more reliable backup drive for my new iMac running OS Mohave 10.14.6. Upon plugging in to the thunderbolt port, it immediately appeared on the desktop. Upon opening Time Machine I was able to chose the new SanDisk Extreme and execute the Time Machine backup. The xfer speed did not show during the process but it completed backing up a little over 600GB in four hours. It is much smaller than I expected which makes it very portable. I definitely recommend!!!!

I own three of these (2 - TB and 1 - 500MB) I really like the versatility, portability, and speed. Because this SSD has a rubberish casing it I am more comfortable tossing it in my gadget gear pouch. It connects quickly to my Mac, PC, and iPad. I often use it as my network between devices. It comes with a type-C cord and small type-A/type-C converter. Transfer rates are excellent, not super fast but fast enough for easy 4K video transfer. The only things I don't like about this device is the cord. The cord is too short and too ridged. I would like to have two cords instead of the small converter. I keep my drive in a gadget pouch so I can easily keep up with everything. I could see the converter getting lost or left in a computer. These are minor compared to the speed, size, and portability of this drive.

I purchased this External SSD to use for photo editing and play games off of. So far, the speeds have matched as advertised and hasn't had any issues out it. It's currently formatted on ExFat being used on both my Windows and Mac operating systems and working perfect between the two operating systems. I've also been running Call of Duty Warzone off of it on high settings without any lag and keeps up perfectly. This SSD is fantastic! I can't get over how small it is for the size and speeds it has. I highly recommend this hard drive for anyone needing a portable drive to game or edit from. I've attached a picture to compare its size to a pack of gum.

I got this SSD external drive because my Macbook Pro's storage is dismal (120GB) and photography is a hobby of mine. It didn't take long at all before I ran out of storage space, so I looked for an external SSD that would make the process of managing photos externally as simple as possible. This SanDisk SSD was the perfect choice because I offers SSD speeds, and is extremely portable and can use either a USB-A or USB-C cable to connect to a device. This allows me to just use a USB-C to USB-C cable so that I don't always have to pack around a dongle (my Macbook Pro only has Thunderbolt/USB-C ports). SanDisk made some excellent decision in the design of this external drive, because it is so light and small it would be prone to sliding around quite easily, but there is a rubbery texture around the edges and on the back of it so that it will not slide easily as it is sitting on a desk or tabletop. I have not had any issues at all with it. I highly recommend it. It is rather pricey but if you want an extremely portable and convenient storage solution I would say it's worth paying more (rather than an internal SSD drive inside an enclosure-that is prone to moving/losing connection to the enclosure terminal).

The drive itself is amazing. It's tiny, light, and fast as hell, truly living up to the promised 550 MB/s. That said, if you plan to use this drive for anything other than movies, music, and pictures, you need to format it before using it. This is especially true if you plan to use the drive to back up your phone or computer. Out of the box, the drive is formatted with exFAT and an allocation size of 1 MB. That means that any file less than 1 MB takes up 1 MB of space. 1 MB may not seem like much on a 250 GB-2 TB drive, but with the myriad of small files that show up on backups taking up 1,000x more space than normal, it adds up. See the attached pictures for a small text file taking up 2,700x more space than it actually is and a 177 GB backup taking up an extra 73 GB on the drive. I mention this because it's an easy fix. According to the command line, the sector size on the drive is 512 bytes, meaning there is no reason to have an allocation size that large. All you need to do is format the drive as exFAT and select a smaller allocation size than 1 MB. Microsoft recommends 128 KB, but you could go as small as 4 KB or as large as 256 KB and still be far more efficient than the factory 1 MB allocation size.

I bought this after a 2TB G drive I got on Amazon failed on me the first day. It has been reliable and close to rated speeds consistently. I think I am done buying important electronics from Amazon! I lost a lot of images through this.

I already had one of these, but need two for a trip, and they were on sale during the holidays for around $130. These SSDs are excellent. The newer/faster model was around $30 more, but 500MBps is fast enough for just about anything. They are small and light. They also come with a USB-C to USB-A adapter, along with the USB-C cable, so you retain compatibility.