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

I bought this product to use during an upgrade from MacOs High Sierra to Monterey, but unfortunately the Thunderbolt firmware on High Sierra was too old. It could recognise the drive on the Thunderbolt bus, but couldnt mount the disk. Once I had upgraded to Monterey the disk worked perfectly!

Right out of the box, this drive actually appears to exceed the manufacturer’s quoted performance metrics for sequential read and writes speeds. Was a pleasant surprise! It is literally a solid chunk of black metal. Very high quality physical fit and finish with very high quality performance. It’s about the size of a deck of cards but feels heavy and solid in the hand. Mine stays put, tucked away just out of sight on top of my iMac Pro’s base. Using this drive as primary cache/scratch media storage for an iMac Pro assistant station in a post-production facility. It runs at 90%+ capacity, 24/7 and the performance and reliability have been absolutely top notch. Makes 4K DPX and EXR image sequences feel like ProRes on an edit timeline.

used for 5 months, was fast enough, but got really hot, finally failed a few weeks ago.

I needed an external drive for my mac mini (which only came with 256 gig, it was an emergency buy). This one feels as if it is an internal drive. I had trouble with stability with other external SSD drives. This one works great, also when doing heavier stuff with final cut where even for very small projects hundreds of gig are required. I only use it for a day now (including video editing for a night) but it is a relief to be on a stable harddrive.

Love it, o ya issue is the cord is magnetic and sometimes disconnects when I move my laptop

Initially had problems as the disk is formatted for a Mac. No big deal I had a successful career pretending to be IT, I can handle this! Could not reformat the drive, updated all USB/Thunderbolt drivers, and still could not recognize the drive. Turns out the TB and USB ports on my name-brand computer were marked backward. Great work (insert name of major computer manufacturer here) dont need to be sued)).. Great thanks to the folks at Fantom Drives who had me up and running in no time at all

Excellent speed

Wasnt initially impressed with the benchmarks, then I read the owners manual (make sure you do) and there were a few things that needed to be done in windows 10 to unlock the full speed. After that I ran benchmarks and got soeeds better than advertised. I also did some windows tweeks to improve performance for audio latency and that seemed to imorovr speeds even more. By the time I was done optimizing Windows 10 I was able to transfer a 90GB sample library from my Sabrent Rocket 4.0 NVME internal drive to the Fantom Drives Thunderbolt 3 external in under a minute, and that contained thousands of small files whicj are usually the slowest to copy. Fast and a very solid vuild quality.

After using this for a few weeks now, Im thoroughly impressed by the speed of the drive. I do large vector illustrations(work) and 3d animation(hobby) and its way faster for me to work directly on the extreme from FD than it is to work on the Mac itself. Fits perfectly into my desk set up and also good because I can carry it around when Im on my macbook pro. The listing mentions the quality of the build. When I received it, I could definitely feel the quality in my hands from the first time. Hands down would recommend any mac users looking exclusively for mac ssds. Ive added crystal disk results from my pc with thunderbolt 3 port and black magic results with my mac. i got better than advertised speed with the crystal disk surprisingly. I get it, this is pretty expensive, as is any new technology for that matter. However, when comparing the quality and price of other Thunderbolt 3 nvme ssds, its cheaper and better quality. The performance seems to be more consistent and better as well. First time getting fantom drives but if their other products are as good as this, they got themselves a loyal customer. Im kind of glad i clicked on a social media ad for once.

Many years ago, I was an assistant editor on a mid-budget Hollywood film. Since digital, non-linear editing was still a new thing, our studio had assigned a special technician to the show, to answer our many questions and to generally keep us happy. Our tech made a comment once, while exchanging removable 100GB units from within our custom-built drive tower (these units were the size of small watermelons and weighed about 20lbs each!) He said that one day — in the *future* — wed be able to hold *1TB* drives in the palms of our hands, and that theyd be the *size of credit cards* The eXtreme Im now holding is actually 2TB, and its read/write speeds are surreal. This futuristic object plugs in like a line jack into a console, and exchanges data at rates not seen in systems costing less than $5,000. Im blown away by its utility, and have no complaint whatever about its use. This is a device from the future we were all promised, which will be useful far into our own future, as well…