OWC's Thunderbolt 5 External SSD for Latest Macs is Impressively Fast

Drive speeds these days are just crazy. We’ve come so far from the 5400rpm spinner days, which wasn’t even that long ago if you think about it.

Definitely continues to make apple’s upgrade pricing structure look more and more ridiculous each year.

$400 for a 2TB drive sounds expensive, until you remember it's $600 to upgrade from 2TB to 4TB directly with Apple

and the $600 4TB drive is half the price of Apple's upgrade from 4TB to 8TB at $1200!

I purchased a 2Tb ssd drive from Amazon this summer for $89. This is no bargain to me.

Nobody said it was a bargain. The one you bought for $89 obviously doesn't reach anywhere close to 6 GB/s transfer speeds like this one does. That might be totally fine for you, but I don't get the point of your comment. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

meh. I just want an empty enclosure to put an 8TB WD Black NVME In

$600 for 4TB TB5 is unhinged. I don't care what anyone says about it being super fast or top tech. Just delusional pricing.

Obviously not a product intended for you.

This is a great deal for people who will need very fast drives on their new ThunderBolt 5 enabled computers and don't want to pay for the very fast internal storage that Apple offers.

no enclosure option?

This first ThunderBolt 5 drive has just been announced. Enclosures will come later, and will require drives fast enough to take advantage of ThunderBolt 5 and the computers with interfaces to take advantage of a fast drive.

Meh, not even full PCIE 4.0 speeds I get in my PC. Grabbed a 4TB SN850X for £215, tyvm.

Great. You know this is an external drive, right? And will be used for high end production on computers that aren't even available yet? How is your comment relevant to this article?

meh. I just want an empty enclosure to put an 8TB WD Black NVME In

There are plenty of enclosures for ThunderBolt 4 for NVME drives. I have several WD Black drives in currently available enclosures.

ThunderBolt 5 enclosures will become available not long after there are actually computers that could use it. At some point there will be enclosures that have not even been announced yet, perfect for those fast drives and faster than the enclosures I have now.

I purchased a 2Tb ssd drive from Amazon this summer for $89. This is no bargain to me.

Obviously not a product intended for you. It's great that the Amazon drive works for you, i have some of those too. But I need very fast drives on my video editing computers and the $89 drive is not in the same market as the ThunderBolt 5 drive.

Seriously, some people need to work on their reading comprehension and context. These new drives are announced before the computers that can use their optimal speed are even available. This is great news for those of us who are more productive when using very fast drives and didn't spend the extra thousand dollars on internal storage.

I'm never going to buy a Ferrari, but I don't tell everyone that they should buy a Nissan Versa instead because it's cheaper.

Expensive, but also a lot cheaper than spec'ing additional terabytes of storage when you buy a new Mac.

Fortunately my needs are quite modest and I get away with a much slower external SSD for the media I've offloaded from my iMac's internal drive (Photos, TV and Music libraries).