While the transfer speeds of this drive are right up there among the best, in our tests the G-Drive Mobile Pro has an unfortunate tendency to spontaneously disconnect at random. The sleek dark grey aesthetics look right at home next to the space gray MacBook Pro or MacBook Air, and it includes a removable rubber bumper for shock protection from drops or falls. The aluminium enclosure acts as a heatsink, helping to reduce temperatures and maintain performance without throttling. While the write speed is not quite as fast as the Samsung X5, the read speed is significantly faster, offering more balanced performance. The Glyph Atom Pro is our choice for the best external Thunderbolt 3 SSD. The speed test results listed below were calculated using BlackMagic Desk Speed Test, from an average of multiple runs over a 5 minute period.

The best Thunderbolt 3 SSD’s for the Mac Speed comparison In this article, we’ll be taking a look at the best external Thunderbolt 3 SSD’s you can buy today in 2021 for your Mac. For that, you really need an SSD.Īlthough the majority of external SSD’s are USB drives, the fastest external SSD’s currently available use Thunderbolt 3 for read and write speeds several times several times faster than USB, often even approaching the performance of internal PCIe drives. While an external hard drive may be sufficient for storing larger files, the speed is just too slow for working with gigabytes of photos, or for video editing, especially at higher resolutions. Video and photo files can very quickly fill the limited internal SSD storage of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, making an external drive of some description an essential purchase.

Online content production requires a lot of storage. Photo Credit: Glyph Production Technologies

Fastest external ssd for mac