Fantom Drives Extreme 2TB External SSD - 2800MB/s, Thunderbolt 3 and 4, USB Type-C, Aluminum, 3D NAND TLC, TB3X-2300N2TB

UPDATE I reformatted the drive as APFS encrypted and saw ~4.8% drop in write speed to 2439-2446 MB/s. Read stayed in the low 2500s. Still blazing and now more secure. I also picked up a Maxonar Thunderbolt 4 half-meter cable for something a little longer. The included cable is labeled as Thunderbolt 3. There is no noticeable speed difference between them. ORIGINAL REVIEW I got the 4TB non-TLC with the 3k speed and it's delivering about 3x the write and 4x the read speed of my Samsung T7 of the same capacity, which is basically a USB 3.2 speed drive, not Thunderbolt. This is about 4 ounces heavier than the T7, with a solid feeling metal case vs. the T7's rubberized case,. It's a thicc little drive that's a smidger taller, wider, and thicker than the T7. I tested it against the internal drive in a 2 month old MacBook Pro M3 (16") and a 3-year-old desktop PC gaming rig. While it got blown out of the water by the MBP's internal drive which was 2-3x faster in each measure, it was 80% as fast on write and almost double on read compared to the desktop with NVME. When you see people claiming they sped up an old, slow machine by using some variant of this as a boot drive, I'd bet they're telling the truth. It's fast enough to power a number of low-to-mid-range laptops or even desktops if they have USB 4 or Thunderbolt 4. Obviously I just picked this up and I'm in a honeymoon phase. We'll have to see how durable both the drive and its speeds are. But I am predicting I am not going to have storage anxiety with my MBP for a while.

It's pretty expensive but the speeds seem fine playing my games thus far. I need to get another lightning cable I guess that's like 3 inches longer. I don't know y it's so short. Anyway it feels solid and is doing it's going.

I've been looking for an external SSD that is reasonably fast when using my M2 Mac Studio. The Mac's internal drive has scorching speeds that hover at 6GB/sec write and 5GB/sec Read with Blackmagic speed tests. The Fantom gives a consistent 2.8 Read and 2.2 write connected directly to a Thunderbolt port or the Caldigit Thunderbolt Hub connected to a Thunderbolt port. This is a huge difference from the appx 800mb/sec most USB 3.1 Gen 2 devices showed me. I bought the Samsung Shield, a ruggedized T7, for space and paid appx the same price for 4GB as I did for 2GB of the Fantom. The Fantom runs hot, but not as hot as other devices not sitting on a massive heatsink. I followed a Youtube genius's directions to build a Thunderbolt 3 drive using a 1TB Sabrent Rocket NVME PCIe M.2 card and a Sabrent toolless enclosure. The Fantom runs relatively hot compared to a quality USB-C 3.1 like a T7, but when you get into Thunderbolt, my experience has seen a significant increase in the heat of the device. A 2 GB SSD would have been double the price or more and my Sabrent project was a good deal at the time.. I almost doubled the speed of a USB-C Gen 2 device with 1400mbs read and 1500mbs. Storage prices have dropped significantly, and the Fantom will probably drop as well, as this market segment has seen significant technological improvement. Still, if you need fast external storage today, this is an excellent SSD. I hope it sustains as the heat is a concern, but my Rocket is even hotter but has run “like a champ" for the past 18 months.

This drive changed my life, at least as far as managing photos on my M1 Mac Mini is concerned. I'd long since transferred my Photos library (55K photos, 2.2K videos) to an external USB drive because I didn't have enough storage on my Mac Mini. I hadn't realized that that would actually degrade the performance of my Photos library because of the slow transfer speed of standard USB. I visited an Apple Store and discussed pros and cons of buying a new M2 Mini with more memory and/or more storage, but the "genius" (if they call them that anymore) recommended getting a Thunderbolt SSD for my Photos library. This Fantom drive seemed to offer great performance and capacity for the money, so I bought it and transferred my Photos library, and the rest is history. It's like having a new Mac. And, I got a big enough size that I have plenty of space to fool around with 4K video, etc for a while. It's true I haven't done things like use this "in the field" where I'd put the durability to a test, but I have no regrets about this purchase so far.

Buyer beware!! - I've bought two of these in as many years and they have now both officially failed!! One was purchased in November 2024 and one in December 2023. I've had platter drives - standard HDs last longer. Currently, I have a 10 TB Seagate HD Barracuda running every day in the background - bought in 2021. I was impressed with the build quality - very sturdy enclosure - speed was good - but to have two drives fail - one in less than a year is horrible. I have other brands that I've had longer that show no signs of trouble.

I've had this 4TB thunderbolt drive for over a year. It seems to work well and I've had no problems EXCEPT in getting it setup. It took a call to tech support to get it to work with a PC. It was a hassle. I'm writing this review because I decided I needed another drive and I would have just bought another one of these. BUT I just don't want to go through the hassle of setting up another one---NOT for the price I paid for it. Surely it would be an advantage to the company to sell a version ready to use on a PC. How hard would that be? I would even pay a little more. Oh well.

So far they seem like a good value, but they are not 2800 MB/s rather 2533. Still within range. I'll keep it.

Once there's more than 1.5 TB on the Drive it slows to a trickle... Has nothing to do with thermal, but for some reason on multiple computers and different versions of OS it slows to 50mbps write speed.

The fastest drive I have ever used ! And the space of 4TB is ample to work out of and store at the same time ! Just brilliant!

La velocidad de los discos thunderbolt es impresionante y despues de 1 año de uso considero que es un buen disco portatil. La calidad de materiales es 10/10 y aunque es para windows y mac, yo lo formatie para usarlo solo en mac.

the device looks solid. i immediately formatted to encrypted apfs. ran a amorphous diskmark and reads go up to 2.7GB but writes are around 1.7GB only. not sure if that's due to encryption.

Easily set up for my MacBook Pro & no issues.