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

Set the FD drive up for my new Time Machine to my mid 2020 iMac Thunderbolt 3. Just plug and go. Fast! Had to use it to restore my iMac after a memory failure required a complete wipe disc, and reinstall Big Sur. Getting my apps and data that use 400gb was quick! Less than 20 minutes. Getting another one for expansion. My iMac only has a 500gb SSD.

I purchased this external drive to become the new primary / boot drive for my mid-2017 27” iMac. When I purchased my iMac five years ago, it came with a Fusion drive (small SDD and slow 5400rpm traditional HDD). Fast forwarding to present day, I found the Fusion drive getting slower and I wasn’t keen on removing the screen of the iMac to replace the old Fusion drive. Since my iMac supports Thunderbolt 3, this external drive is faster than the Fusion drive. Following a tutorial I found via internet search, I mirrored the contents from the old drive to this new external one with minimal effort and then set it as the boot drive the system. My five year old iMac now boots faster and applications launch faster… likely adding a few more years of life to my iMac before I ultimately replace it. Write speeds are more than double the old drive, and read speeds are close to double when I ran benchmarks on the old and new drives.

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.

Backed up MacBook Air in half the time of older drives. Also someone had asked if it came with a cable and I miss spoke, there was a short ~6 thunderbolt cable in the box.

Ive been looking for an affordable external hard drive for my gaming needs, and needed an SSD with multiple different ports so its compatible with all the different devices I use. The device arrived on time, in nice packaging, and works exactly as expected. The enclosure is small, its amazing how you can get 4TB in such a small enclosure. And it looks sleek!

This TBT3 drive is fast. Love the extreme speed I get out of this ext drive. Windows 10 Pro on Intel NUC 10 i7. Runs fairly warm but the performance is amazing. Worth the $$$ but not cheap.

Wow! This thing is fast! Purchased this to optimize the timemachine transfer from my 2017 core i7 MacBook Pro to my new 2023 M2 Max Mackbook Pro. When I first got it I benchmarked it on my 2017 MBP with Blackmagic connected via Thunder Bolt 3 and got 2.5 GB/s read and 2.3 GB/s write. Reformates it from HFS+ to APFS to optimize it for timemachine and re ran the benchmark with the same results. Very happy. Ran timemachine to it and with in an hour my 800GB Backup was completed. Went to restore the new M2 Max MBP from the backup and I was up and running in 30min! As you can see in the photo it was transferring at 2.02 GB/s couldn’t be happier!

Fantom offered the exact same drive, with 2-day shipping, for a total of $424.00. The price was based on a 10% off sale (of which they seem to have on a frequent basis). Hence, I bought the 2TB eXtreme Pro Thunderbolt 3 drives directly from the vendor. For those who absolutely must have Seagate or WD drives, realize that each 2TB drive (I purchased two) has the PNY brand Gen 4 XLR8 CS3040 M.2 NVMe 2TB SSD drive, which has been reviewed by PC Magazine as being not only significantly faster than the aforementioned TB 3 SSDs, but are rated for 2-million hours (MTBF); that’s 500,000 hours more than most. Like other similar drives, it has the same 5-year warranty. I once fell into the “It’s gotta be a Seagate or WD SSD!” camp, and only bought LaCie drives. I changed my mind after researching Internet sites and watching a number of YouTube videos that declared the PNY CS3040 to have superior throughput in comparison to the popular LaCie model and others, based on its excellent on-board controller. Reviews are one thing, but real-life tests are another: I was surprised to find that the Fantom drives had faster Read/Write numbers than the internal Seagate in my LaCie. The LaCie Ruuged TB3 SSD was almost as fast in the Read mode, but was noticeably slower in the Write mode(?). The Fantoms are faster than the internal Seagate M.2 NVMe SSD in my mid 2020 iMac i9 27-inch 5K 72GB RAM | 5700XT(16GB) GPU. While some might consider it a downside, I actually appreciate the heft and somewhat larger build of these portable drives. Location video shoots can be rough on equipment. These drives get warm, as expected, but thanks to the solid aluminum chassis with recessed heat sink ”fins,” they do not get near as hot as the USB C half-speed (1050 MB/s) drives I used to use on my video camera. Perhaps that’s why they last for 2-million hours. Did I mention that the Torrance, California built 2TB Fantom drive costs less than its portable LaCie and SanDisk/G-Drive counterparts? (Note: the 1 TB version of the same drive uses the ubiquitous WD M.2 NVMe 1TB SSD drive).

Just what we needed!

Great external drive for my MacBook Pro. Uses Thunderbolt 3 for super fast speeds. Packaging said it was formatted for Mac but it was formatted for Windows. Easily fixed w/Macs Disk Utility. Once formatted, its been flawless.