SSD Recommendations, please.

[Dean Wilson]

I'm about 1/10th full on my 2TB SSD Primary Drive and 1/3rd on my 2TB Secondary Drive (Photos Only). I have been "storing" some photos on a couple old SATA Drives scavenged for bad laptops from years ago.

I am thinking of getting a 4 TB SSD (external drive) and my connectivity ports are: Thunderbolt 4 and USB 3.2 Type-C

What are your recommendations...especially which to stay away from!

 

[Bucolic Old Sir Henry]

I have a number of Samsung T7 portable SSDs hanging (literally) off the back of my Mac Studio, both as backup drives and as general storage. Great value for money, and in my experience very reliable.

 

[StevenAunan]

Tom’s Hardware is always the first place I look when upgrading hardware. You can’t go wrong with Samsung SSD’s.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-ssds,3891.html

 

[MikeZ]

I have to agree. I've used Samsung SSD's for both back-up and active storage without an issues.

 

[Archibald]

I have an external Kingston 1 TB SSD USB-C and it works fine.

 

[Dean Wilson]

Thank, Peeps.

 

[THXGEEK]

This is what I use.

OWC Express 1M2 SSD Enclosure

WD BLACK 4TB SN850X NVMe SSD (pick your favorite SSD for this)

Cable Matters 40Gbps USB 4 / TB4 Cable

With these, I have averaged about 1.75 GB/S xfer rates between my OWC CFexpress 4.0 Type B card and this SSD. As always, your mileage may vary.

Please note that having the correct cable is important as lesser cables will work, albeit at a much lower throughput.

 

[Dean Wilson]

Thanks Greg, I didn't think of something as simple as building my own. For the cable I would take advantage of the Thunderbolt port on my laptop. But, what's done is done.

Again, thanks.

 

[qualityresults]

My only concern is I have had a couple of older SSD hard drives lose the information if they are not plugged in regularly, is this still an issue as my understanding is they need to be powered every so often. Although I have a few newer ones they are always plugged in so I don't run into that problem again. Is this still an issue with newer SSDs?

 

[THXGEEK]

My only concern is I have had a couple of older SSD hard drives lose the information if they are not plugged in regularly, is this still an issue as my understanding is they need to be powered every so often. Although I have a few newer ones they are always plugged in so I don't run into that problem again. Is this still an issue with newer SSDs?

I am not aware of any issues with a new SSD losing data by not being plugged in or powered up often enough.

I have, however, lost data from an SSD when I did not initiate an 'eject' command from the OS. Win11 has a 'Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media' option on the bottom right of the taskbar. When you select this, Win11 will flush the write cache for this device and correctly close the connection. Simply yanking out the drive can quite possibly cause data corruption on the SSD. I assume there is a similar function on the Macs.

Lesson learned - I eject the device before disconnecting it.

 

[Dean Wilson]

Craig, as you advised, unmounting is the best. Yesterday when I was unmounting the drive it was always: "Drive in use", so, I just did a normal shut down of the laptop before removing.

 

[JCBigler]

A couple of months ago I bought a 4TB Samsung T7 SSD on al from B&H.

After I reformatted it and renamed it I started copying a bunch of data from my audio recording hard drive to the new T7 drive.

The things fried itself on the very first data write. I had about 1.2TB that I was trying to move. The drive died about half way through the write. I lost all of that data.

I tried everything to revive it. Windows Explorer wouldn't see it. Drive Management wouldn't see it. My Mac Book Pro wouldn't see it. I even tried to locate it in Linux. Linux saw the physical drive but couldn't address it because the MBR was messed up.

I sent it in to Samsung and they replaced it with a 4TB T9.

I'm still a little wary of that T9. My older 500GB and 1TB T5 and EVO SATA and 970 NVMe Samsung SSDs, and my Crucial P300 NVMe and even the 2TB SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD have all been fine.

But I really need to pony up and build a home NAS with a bunch of 12TB HDDs.

Tom’s Hardware is always the first place I look when upgrading hardware. You can’t go wrong with Samsung SSD’s.

 

[THXGEEK]

But I really need to pony up and build a home NAS with a bunch of 12TB HDDs.

Sorry to hear about your fried drive and lost data. Been there, done that and used really, really bad language. Then I started making redundant backups of all my important files.

I have a QNAP NAS which has been going strong for about nine years (24x7) - this will soon be replaced by this one. I spool full backups to it every month and differentials every week. I also maintain a number of external drives (including the one I referenced above) for ad-hoc backups of everything. These get stored off-site and moved into and out of rotation.

(I am an IT security manager - Disaster Recovery & Contingency Planning are among my many responsibilities)