atonaldenim

Mike Wuerthele said:

we'd stick with native Thunderbolt or USB4 at least for a few years until USB-C shakes out a little more. Acasis has a really nice USB4 NVMe enclosure that I'm personally using, which would deliver full speeds on the drives that are being used in this system. Sabrent has a nice Thunderbolt one for about $100. 

Good point Mike about 40Gbps USB4 offering an even better speed improvement than 20Gbps Gen 2x2, on most/all? Apple Silicon Macs, and also for less-than-Thunderbolt prices. Looks like right now a USB4 enclosure like Acasis plus a fast PCIe 4.0 SSD would cost about $400-500 altogether, not bad at all really.

For some reason I have a little superstition about putting a desktop SSD inside a portable enclosure, I have heard that portable drives can get different firmware to draw less power or otherwise operate well in a mobile context. But I have no evidence for this, and I know plenty of people do it, so I should probably just get over it!

Blokkhead said:

Curious pricing, given that stand-alone SanDisk 4TB Extreme PRO Portable SSD - Up to 2000MB/s - USB-C, USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (same speeds) is $379 amazon delivered.

Based on this news, I just ordered an open box 4TB Sandisk Extreme Pro from Amazon Warehouse for $277. A 4TB SSD with a Thunderbolt port costs well over twice that much, so this will hopefully be a good deal for now and faster in the future on a new Mac.

We'll probably also be seeing some fast USB4 SSD options hitting the market soon this year too with hopefully sub-Thunderbolt pricing.

JP234 said:

Iomega made the Zip and Jaz drives. I got a promo Zip to evaluate. I refused to give it back, and so did every other reviewer. I looked up Iomega stock, and it was $3.52/share. I bought a thousand shares (my wife wouldn't let me buy more). The next year, they split 2:1 six times, and I wound up with 12,000 shares, which got up to about $50/share. We sold 6,000 shares and paid off the mortgages on both my house and my print shop building, and bought a new BMW 325is. That was the day Iomega peaked, and we sold off the remaining 6,000 later in the year for about $25/share. The best investment we've ever made.

This is one of the best tech stock pick stories I've ever heard. Bravo!

That's a great clarification Mike, thanks for the update! Wow this is the first news about the M2 series that has really made me consider upgrading my M1 Ultra Mac Studio when the M2 Ultra Macs hit the market...

Wow the M2 Max supports USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 at 20Gbps? That's a scoop right there, I haven't seen that reported anywhere! 

Since I work in film editing I have a keen interest in how quickly I'm able to copy several terabytes of data between drives. Thanks for the info!

What computer did you use that was able to get close to 20Gbps read/write speeds? I was under the impression that no Mac has USB-C 3.2 Gen 2x2 ports, and that any Gen 2x2 device would operate at 10 Gbps speeds. Perhaps that’s not the case with USB4 ports on some new Apple Silicon Macs? Please let us know!

The photo shows a pretty dusty Macbook Pro 16” behind the SSD so I’m guessing that’s an M1 Pro/Max Macbook Pro? Is that what you tested the speeds on? With the latest Ventura I’m guessing? I’ve never bought a Gen 2x2 device since they never had a benefit for Macs before, so I can’t test it out myself on my M1 Ultra Studio.

This “mag” system seems designed for digital cinema cameras like the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K which supports recording to USB-C drives, but has no other affordances for attaching an external drive to the camera. Rather than having to unmount and remount an SSD drive on an external bracket attached to the camera, the mag reader housing can remain permanently attached to the camera and the mags can easily pop in and out.

Proprietary systems like this seem to come and go — see the G-Drive Evolution system for example — but it’s an interesting idea, hope it catches on.