OWC's Ultra-Fast Portable SSD for Thunderbolt 3 Macs Now Available With Up to 4TB of Storage

Boooo, only up to 4 TB.

As a backup drive for recent Macs, we need up to at least 8 TB, better 16.

External SSDs that can be bought shouldn't be smaller than the internal drives that Macs come with.

If I can buy a MacBook with 8 TB internal SSD storage, I should be able to buy an external drive with 16 TB.

For backup usage, you should just get a mechanical hard drive.

I got a used HP MSA Storageworks SAS enclosure with 25 2.5” bays and 25 480Gb muskin chronos sata 6Gb ssd on a LSI 9260-8e 1gb controller and it is way faster while giving me the performance I need. I paid less than 1k total 2 years ago…

And nearly as portable as the OWC drive 😜

Looks good… and expensive. I recently bought a 4TB SanDisk Extreme PRO Portable SSD ('https://www.westerndigital.com/products/portable-drives/sandisk-extreme-pro-usb-3-2-ssd#SDSSDE81-4T00-G25') for half the price. Not as fast as this OWC drive (up to 2000MB/s instead of 2800MB/s) but I prefer Sandisk's compact form format.

It's worth noting though that 2000MB/s is only achievable with non-Mac computers, since it requires USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, that no Mac supports. So only 1000MB/s effectively.

I have one of their Thunderblade drives - the hardware is very good. However, it ships with some required software (Softraid), and they first tell you your existing version is out of date and you must download a new version ... and when you download and install the update, it starts telling you the update has expired, and demanding money for an upgrade ... just really nuisance-ware. Based on all that hassle, I would not buy an OWC product again ... which is a pity because the design of the hardware is great. I still have not figured out how to get rid of the irritating 'upgrade me' messages that stick on my desktop everyday.

The drive will show up as a bunch of individual drives unless you have RAID software. OWC ships a version of SoftRAID that only works on the hardware you bought unless you upgrade to the paid universal version. SoftRAID is generally very good though I haven't used it with Apple Silicon yet.

Can't you just use Disk Utility on the Mac to Raid the individual drives? I would think you could and not use the software they provide.

Boooo, only up to 4 TB.

As a backup drive for recent Macs, we need up to at least 8 TB, better 16.

External SSDs that can be bought shouldn't be smaller than the internal drives that Macs come with.

If I can buy a MacBook with 8 TB internal SSD storage, I should be able to buy an external drive with 16 TB.