Yottamaster 512GB External SSD, Up to 460MB/s Aluminum Portable SSD

Very portable. Does a good job.

So noobie here, first I’d like to say I love it. I have really zero complaints aside from the price, it being expensive is the only downside side, but that’s neither here nor there. It is extremely fast, I bought it to save up space on my desktop for my music samples since I make music. I originally had an HDD and well, needless to say that was an awful experience, would have taken 2-4 hours to transfer the same music samples that this little guy did in LITERALLY 1 second. I was astonished , it was exactly what I was looking for. I do wish the actual device had more interactive buttons physically on it, it being very bare does make it not necessarily confusing but not as user friendly. All in all, very very happy, you will not be disappointed!!

Nice strong aluminum alloy case body, small and compact and feels good in the hand. A cool bit: the lanyard is the USB C cable with the ends locked in a clasp. I’m not really IT inclined, so I had to get the instructions off the net. I have to access it via “Files” directory for a chosen pic, file and such. After that, it’s like another external SSD. snick-snick.

Because if the RAM and NAND price disaster I was forced to pick this up and it sucks, but it does the job. It’s slow and it’s chip makes spotlight on the Mac crash and eject it randomly. I had to disable Spotlight. But if you do that it’s acceptable.

Great price, great quality. Working fine.

Perfect size and it works great

This is a little SSD enclosure with a USB-C port. There are no vents or controls or switches or external power - just the USB-C port and a LED activity light. It's about 3in tall x 1.5in wide and .5in thick. The grey part is aluminum and then the front and back edges are black plastic. It's very similar to some of the SSD enclosures you can get where you supply the SSD (with a tray sliding out for you to put in it, then sliding into the main body), only you can't open this one (there's no latch or pressure switch that opens it). The USB-C cable it comes with has a built-in adapter for USB-A on one end (so you can use it with either type of USB port). There is no separate power cord - just the one. USB-A vs C doesn't make any difference in the drive speeds - bandwidth for both is much higher than the drive inside can handle, so you'll get the same performance from either (more detail below). It worked for me with my phone, laptop, and a few desktops I tried. The drive comes formatted ExFAT, so it supports 4GB+ files and should work with just about any device (not Windows-only like NTFS drives or only files below 4GB like FAT32). I compared this against a WD 512GB portable SSD from some 4-5 years ago. The WD is wider and about the same height, but then is thinner than this one. After filling this with files in the 6-8GB range I copied everything off to the other SSD and then back to this one, as well as to/from the drives to the host computer, and with USB-C/A to see if there was a difference. For this drive I was able to get consistent 350MB/s read speeds (from this to the host or other drive) over the entire timeframe of emptying the drive - no drops. The other drive running a similar test was more in the 450-500MB/s range (so already this isn't the fastest drive). In write testing I was able to get 350MB/s for some 10-15 seconds (some 3-5GB usually) and then it would throttle down to 20-40MB/s. It would stay at this lower speed for the remainder of the transfer. By comparison the WD one could do roughly 450-500MB/s writes consistently as well (though it got much warmer than this - to where it was almost too hot to touch). During sustained heavy reads or writes this drive would be warm to the touch - not hot or painful to the touch, but warm (like the bottom of a laptop or back of a phone after taxing them for a while). I did test whether the write speed throttling was thermal in nature by spraying this with inverted canned air (to get the cold fluid on the casing). After a second or two of spray the metal case was quite chilled (almost frostbite-level, trying to stick to my fingers). Despite this there was no perceptible improvement in transfer speeds. It warmed up again a couple minutes later (slower than I expected) and speeds were still unchanged. This all tells me that it wasn't throttling due to heat, but due to using a low-end SSD (particularly true if the mid-range portable one I'm comparing this to from some 4-5 years ago was faster by that much). I also tried switching from USB-A to straight USB-C and got identical results - there is no difference with this drive in the transfer speeds. The interface bandwidth is higher than either drive on write or read (the SSD inside either of them becomes the choke point), so it doesn't make a difference. Overall the performance for this one is roughly similar to some WD "Green" 120GB SSDs I have from 2016-17 - not great, but better than HDDs (and being smaller and using less power, so there are still plenty of advantages). This will be good if you're wanting to store media or such to play on a phone or external device. It could also be good for smaller file transfers back and forth - just be aware it's not going to move quickly if you're copying a lot to this drive. It could also be good for something like a TrueNAS boot drive. All in all, it's a good little drive for basic use... I just wouldn't use it where you need speed (which is ironic, since that's usually why you'd get an SSD in the first place...) I've knocked a star off for the cumulative effects of: -Quick throttling/slow write speeds -Difficult to understand manual (though thankfully it's plug-and-play so you don't need it much) -Slight difference in grey between the grey case and the warmer brown-grey of the USB cable -Heavily promoting fast USB speeds where the choke point is the drive inside the unit For the price it's still not bad.

package arrived as stated. Connected to the Laptop, started file backup and was fast, but quickly degraded to a very slow speed (average 30 Mbp/s). I just needed it for storing files and having a back up. so hope it works!