Today's SSD drives are so fast that they speed up your entire Mac — but unless you spend a lot of money, they're also very small. You can manage on 128GB of space instead, but it takes discipline and apps to pull it off.
The DiskAshur 2 external SSD boasts high levels of protection with hardware encryption and a keypad to gain entry, but even with the enhanced level of security, the drive is easy to use and offers more than enough performance for the majority of its potential users.
Storage maker Lexar on Wednesday announced the Mac-compatible Professional SL100 Pro Portable SSD, its signature feature being a USB-C port with with USB 3.1 Gen 2 speeds.
The new LaCie Mobile SSD was designed with Mac users in mind, sporting a stylish diamond-cut enclosure, color-matched anodized aluminum, and a fast internal drive.
Transcend on Thursday launched a trio of Mac-compatible portable SSDs with USB-C, supporting Gen 2 and UASP for speeds up to 520 megabytes per second.
Announced on Wednesday, Plugable's new NVMe SSD enclosure is tool-free, and utilizes the full speed of USB 3.1 type C generation 2.
There isn't much in the way of storage that can touch the maximum speed that Thunderbolt 3 can deliver and keep pushing the data at that speed, but the Akitio Node Lite with Intel Optane SSD and Thunderbolt 3 comes very close — without thermal slowdown.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Seagate's boutique brand LaCie has introduced several new mobile drives, all connecting over USB-C, and all designed with Mac in mind.
Akitio has announced the immediate availability of their latest Thunderbolt 3 device, the bright red Node Lite that comes equipped with a 960GB Intel Optane NVMe SSD with speeds up to 2600 MB/s.
Samsung has launched the Portable SSD X5, the first NVMe-based external drive of its type from the company, with the compact storage device boasting high transfer speeds thanks to its Thunderbolt 3 connectivity and fast memory.
Fantom Drives has long been purveyors of external drives, almost always encased in a durable metal body. Their new 1TB G-Force 3.1 drive carries on that tradition with the addition of USB-C.
Patriot Memory launched a new external storage device at CES, with the Evlvr Thunderbolt 3 Portable SSD boasting high writing and reading performance in a compact package, one that is also claimed to be power efficient as well as fast.
Mac upgrade supplier OWC has released its newest SSDs, the Aura Pro X, with the flash-based PCIe storage said to be the fastest the firm has ever produced, claimed to offer up to 2.3 times better performance compared to the stock storage used by Apple.
Flash and memory company Transcend has announced the JetDrive 820 PCI Express PCIe Generation 3.0 solid-state drive for certain Mac models — but in some cases it will be slower than the stock drive in the machine.
Long-time Mac upgrade vendor OWC will soon launch SMART Alec, a utility to keep an eye on the health reporting data from SSDs, hard drives, and Fusion Drives connected to a Mac.
Apple's tool for migrating data from a new 15-inch MacBook Pro's SSD soldered to the motherboard has been spotted, and utilizes the unused connector discovered in tear-downs of the hardware.
Recent examinations of the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar show that Apple has abandoned the socketed SSD as seen in the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Function Keys model.
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William Gallagher
Malcolm Owen
Roger Fingas
Andrew O'Hara
Mike Wuerthele
