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

UPDATEI reformatted the drive as APFS encrypted and saw ~4.8% drop in write speed to 2439-2446 MB/s. Read stayed in the low 2500s. Still blazing and now more secure. I also picked up a Maxonar Thunderbolt 4 half-meter cable for something a little longer. The included cable is labeled as Thunderbolt 3. There is no noticeable speed difference between them.ORIGINAL REVIEWI got the 4TB non-TLC with the 3k speed and it's delivering about 3x the write and 4x the read speed of my Samsung T7 of the same capacity, which is basically a USB 3.2 speed drive, not Thunderbolt.This is about 4 ounces heavier than the T7, with a solid feeling metal case vs. the T7's rubberized case,. It's a thicc little drive that's a smidger taller, wider, and thicker than the T7.I tested it against the internal drive in a 2 month old MacBook Pro M3 (16") and a 3-year-old desktop PC gaming rig. While it got blown out of the water by the MBP's internal drive which was 2-3x faster in each measure, it was 80% as fast on write and almost double on read compared to the desktop with NVME.When you see people claiming they sped up an old, slow machine by using some variant of this as a boot drive, I'd bet they're telling the truth. It's fast enough to power a number of low-to-mid-range laptops or even desktops if they have USB 4 or Thunderbolt 4.Obviously I just picked this up and I'm in a honeymoon phase. We'll have to see how durable both the drive and its speeds are. But I am predicting I am not going to have storage anxiety with my MBP for a while.

Fantom had a used offering on a 2 TB drive. When the package arrived not only did they send the 2 TB I ordered, but they threw in an extra brand new 1 TB. Merry Christmas to me… thank you Fantom Claus ! My guess is they did this because the 2 TB was slightly more dinged up on outside than they described on Amazon. Regardless, both drives work flawlessly and furiously… getting speeds above their claims after formatting to Apple’s APFS. The cables they come with are very short (6 inches)… I guess that’s to facilitate the fastest read/write speeds possible ?!

I've been looking for an external SSD that is reasonably fast when using my M2 Mac Studio. The Mac's internal drive has scorching speeds that hover at 6GB/sec write and 5GB/sec Read with Blackmagic speed tests. The Fantom gives a consistent 2.8 Read and 2.2 write connected directly to a Thunderbolt port or the Caldigit Thunderbolt Hub connected to a Thunderbolt port.This is a huge difference from the appx 800mb/sec most USB 3.1 Gen 2 devices showed me. I bought the Samsung Shield, a ruggedized T7, for space and paid appx the same price for 4GB as I did for 2GB of the Fantom. The Fantom runs hot, but not as hot as other devices not sitting on a massive heatsink.I followed a Youtube genius's directions to build a Thunderbolt 3 drive using a 1TB Sabrent Rocket NVME PCIe M.2 card and a Sabrent toolless enclosure. The Fantom runs relatively hot compared to a quality USB-C 3.1 like a T7, but when you get into Thunderbolt, my experience has seen a significant increase in the heat of the device. A 2 GB SSD would have been double the price or more and my Sabrent project was a good deal at the time.. I almost doubled the speed of a USB-C Gen 2 device with 1400mbs read and 1500mbs.Storage prices have dropped significantly, and the Fantom will probably drop as well, as this market segment has seen significant technological improvement. Still, if you need fast external storage today, this is an excellent SSD. I hope it sustains as the heat is a concern, but my Rocket is even hotter but has run “like a champ" for the past 18 months.

Only took about 30mins for 2 partition/AES-256 encryption, if I recall about 45 to an hour for roughly 400gb. So yup I’m 💯% pleased. It did get warm to touch after the big transfer and that would be common for those sizes.

I've had this 4TB thunderbolt drive for over a year. It seems to work well and I've had no problems EXCEPT in getting it setup. It took a call to tech support to get it to work with a PC. It was a hassle. I'm writing this review because I decided I needed another drive and I would have just bought another one of these. BUT I just don't want to go through the hassle of setting up another one---NOT for the price I paid for it. Surely it would be an advantage to the company to sell a version ready to use on a PC. How hard would that be? I would even pay a little more. Oh well.

The drive stopped working within a year. I filed a warranty claim on their website over 5 months ago and have not had any response nor communications. I followed up over and over, adding comments to my claim. At one point my claim was closed. I reopened it, asked why it was closed. I never got a response. The same thing happened again, also no response. I received an email when I first filed the claim saying they received the claim but other than that I have never received any communications whatsoever from FantomDrives, even after periodic inquiries. The drive was excellent when it was working.I would recommend the product itself, but would not recommend spending your money with a company that does not stand behind its product and will not even communicate with me about a warranty claim.I would give 5 stars for the product itself. Products sometimes fail prematurely. That's what warranties are for. Being totally ghosted when trying to address a warranty problem, though, leads to my one star rating. This is unacceptable.

Extremely fast external drive. Plug and play setup. Great value for the price.