Best Portable Thunderbolt 3 SSDs in 2020 for Mac & PC!

Need a portable SSD for your Thunderbolt 3 MacBook or PC? These SSDs are the BEST of the BEST! Let's Compare & Test 4 of them!

How we made our Custom DIY Portable SSD ⬇️(Amazon Links)

Check Links below for Best Prices on SSDs ⬇️
B&H Links ⬇️

Amazon Links ⬇️

Timestamps ⬇️
Which SSDs we used - 1:01
Portability Comparison - 1:33
Design Compared - 1:47
Durability & Ruggedness - 2:09
Included TB3 Cables Compared - 2:56
Warranties Compared - 3:27
Disk Speed Benchmarks - 3:50
Write Speed Stress Test - 4:34
SLC Cache Amounts & Speed - 5:24
Read Speed Heat Test - 6:32
Long-Term Reliability (TBW) - 7:29
Prices Compared - 8:06
Which SSD Drive should YOU Buy? - 8:36

In this video, we compare just about everything between the Top 4 Portable Thunderbolt 3 SSDs in 2020.

We compare size, portability, design, durability, ruggedness, cables, warranties, speeds, cache, reliability and much more!

These SSDs are the future because of the crazy fast speeds that you can achieve when hooking this up to a computer that supports Thunderbolt 3.

One of these drives had some major issues, while another drive even worked while connected through USB-C!

If you enjoyed this video, Tap Like & Subscribe for our Custom DIY Portable TB3 SSD video coming soon!

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[MaxTechOfficial]

Were you expected these drives to have such a huge difference in performance? Comment below on your choice!

[biankicks]

bRO, this is the THIRD time you pumped out video when I'm about to research on a future purchase. As per usual super helpful!

[thisisbmp]

Well, I actually like G-Drive's design. Bought 2 weeks ago, pretty happy with it.

[alginyes]

Sabrent external thunderbolt 3 2TB bought yesterday for 155.00! 😀 winning!

[Vista.pictures]

I love your videos! As a spanish speaker, The way how you speak clearly and neutral helps us!

[tomdchi]

I'm surprised that only one is backwards compatible with USB 3!

[ilegeul]

I have an X5 1T, and please note that in a temperate summer climate, with temperatures of about 30 deg C, the drive runs so hot that it is barely possible to touch it. As a consequence, it constantly throttles down and the actual speed is way less than advertised, for example now I see 119/209 MB/s. When it gets really hot, speeds can get as low as 50/70 MB/s, which is at the level of a micro SD card. I guess the problem is caused by the thermal design, there is a kind of magnesium part inside that is expected to act as a heat sink, but there might be a small air gap to the enclosure, so probably it does not transfer the heat very well. The major source of heat is the controller chip on the M.2 board. The flash memories are also hot. I had to disable alarms from the SMART monitoring program, since they constantly reported life threatening messages. All in all, I don't think the drive can live very long if running that hot.

I ordered a large M.2 heat sink, and I plan to run the drive open, with the heat sink installed directly on the M.2 board. If this is not enough, the next step is to add a small fan.

[Edit] The heat sink alone did not make a significant difference. I added a large fan on top of everything and now the reported 'Composite Temperature' is around 35 C / 95 F, which helped a lot, the drive runs at full speed most of the time, only during continuous writes it sometimes oscillates between 1980 MB/s to around 1200, which is anyway much better than without the fan.

So, the X5 is nice looking, but performance is very sensitive to temperature. Personally I wouldn't buy another one now. :-(

[SpiritualDreamScapes]

We are now at thunderbolt four. Anybody who’s bought a new Mac uses Thunderbolt 4. The OWC case is large which gives it extra room to breathe to prevent overheating.

[DBLCreations]

I personally liked the blue accents on that g-drive!

[nikhileshbagwala]

Dude u have one of the best versatile channels.

[Madmohawkfilms]

My Thunderbolt 3 drive I’m assembling today myself PROBABLY as fast or faster than any of those. Bought a lot of 480 gig Thunderbolt 3 drives. I’ve got a Sabrent Rocket Q 2 terrabyte NVME coming today which should be perfect as a boot drive for M1 Mac

[WarriorsPhoto]

Another great video. I was shocked by the OWC drives quality. But I’ll go and purchase the Lacie drive instead.
I know you are uploading the DIY video and that’ll be fun for me as I love DIY stuff. (:

[cryptosecuritytools]

The speed of the OWC is truly awesome. I am concerned about the cable though.

[chicagobob]

My experience has been hit and miss on transferring large files. I have had to send several drives back after trying to move a lot of files. I think they were cooked in the process just like you experienced. They were ejected or forced the MacBook pro to reboot and them eventually became not recognized when plugged in.

[shinjiikarir]

Wow this is super helpful and wonderfully explained. Thanks!

[ResizeFilms]

Very useful and informative video. Great job.

[GaryEarl]

wish you did Glyph. some reviews show it best in speed. BUT. excellent reviews. well done.

[qweasdzxc]

Fanastic!!!! Super helpful. Thank you very much.

[colindoyle]

Concentration: Bootable, sustained write speeds - everyone misses this on reviews

[interproservice]

Please turn off indexing in macOS on external drives as mine broke down due to heat because MacOS was non-stop indexing my external drive. It could be hardware issue on this drive, but turning this function off will help expand longevity of your drive