In short, I needed an SSD to back up my MacBook Pro. In the past, I used a spinning hard drive for backup using SuperDuper software and the process was painfully slow. Often, for about 500GB of data, the backup and restore took up to an hour.
With an internal SSD on my MacBook Pro it made perfect sense that the destination backup should also go on an SSD drive where transfer speeds would significantly increase. One more thing to consider: spinning hards drives have a much higher failure rate than SSD drives. I can't begin to tell you how many spinning backup drives I have purchased in the past that have ultimately failed.
SSD is the future and the fact that prices have dramatically decreased on these drives gives no-one an excuse for not buying them.
I did a lot of research on various SSD drives before selecting this SanDisk 1TB drive. My first choice was a Samsung in a colorized metal case. The reviews, however, led me to believe that there were some major issues with the Samsung drives as they included embedded software that was difficult to remove. This is not something anyone wants when buying an SSD drive.
Reading the reviews on this SanDisk Extreme, it was easy to see that this would fit perfectly for my needs. The reviews across the board were very positive. No embedded software. This particular SSD has been rated as one of the very fastest USB drives available on the market as of this date.
Upon arrival, I was astonished at how small this drive actually is. I mean, it's absolutely tiny. You can fit it into your jeans pocket and you would not feel it. We really have come a long way in external SSD drive portability.
I am not particularly happy with the covering on this drive. It's a dust magnet. The second I placed it on my table it had already collected airborne dog hair. However, on the plus side, this thing is so rugged that you can drop it from just about any height and it won't break. So, I guess that is more important than anything else.
It was nice to see that the drive includes a USB-C cord with USB-A adapter. The cord also securely fits the drive without any wiggle. The only thing negative I have to say about the cord is that it's too short.
I am including in my photos the result of a recent backup of my MacBook Pro via SuperDuper software. You can see that about 425GB of data was backed up in 30 minutes time. With a spinning drive, that would have taken 2-3 times longer. This drive is really super fast!
This drive does come formatted for Windows. If you buy it for your Mac, you need to go to DISK UTILITY (in your applications folder), select the SanDisk drive, then click on ERASE. You will want to format the drive in OSX Extended Journaled. The format takes seconds to do. You are then ready to transfer data to the drive.
By far, this is the best SSD drive I have ever owned. Do not hesitate to consider this above any other.
| RAM | 1000 GB |
|---|---|
| Hard Drive | 1000 GB Solid State Hard Drive |
