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Portable SSD recommendations in 2023?
I’m getting a bit tired of paying for iCloud - I really don’t need syncing across devices, so I think I should just switch to an SSD card. I think I would just be using it as backup so not sure that it would need to be super fast, and I would probably get a 2TB one. It must be portable but it doesn’t need to be the tiniest thing around. Any recommendations? Reliability, longevity and a resonably small form factor are probably the most important requirements.
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Those pebble shaped / rounded crucial ones are great, I think I got my last 2tb one for about £100
Crucial X8 2TB Portable SSD - Up to 1050MB/s - PC and Mac - USB 3.2 External Solid State Drive - CT2000X8SSD9 https://amzn.eu/d/d08RKym
Thnx Chris - this, for example?
That’s the cheaper slower one, might be just as good for iPads as the faster one I linked to, but I don’t use them with iPads much
Thnx Chris, and thnx for adding the link. Seems that the 5th gen iPad Pro usb C would handle the fastest speeds that’s capable of, if I’m not mistaken, cheers!
Cool, I really like them, easily pocketable with no sharp edges and (so far about three years in) no data loss…
I have one of these, it's really good:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08HN37XC1/
If you're moving large files around speed is going to matter, and NVMe disks are really fast.
I've been using Samsung T5 and T7 for years both for backups and as my main "live" storage on desktop and they've been perfect -- I also had the exact same requirements that you do and after some research these seemed to be the best bet. I have never used them with iOS though!
Have heard good things but have also heard these are expensive. Will take a look though, thanks, and will also take a look at your recommendation @richardyot
Yes. But when reliability is a concern, price doesn't matter (even though I'm constantly near broke 😂)
I just decided to go for what Richard recommended - reviews seem good, price is reasonable and I love the design. I don't like deliberating too hard on these matters, life's too short. Cheers!
Exactly the same here. Only used the Ts on Mac and Windows machines, not just for backup storage but also as external drive for live use in a DAW, and they are superb.
When I was looking into this the Samsung T-series and the Sandisk Extreme seemed to be on a par with each other in terms of quality, speed, and reliability. IMO you can't go wrong with any of the recommendations made so far (Crucial, Samsung, Sandisk), they're all high-quality manufacturers.
Totally, it’s fairly mature and standard technology at this point, I picked the crucial by looks mainly, but also almost arbitrarily for the first one (might have had the cheapest price or quickest delivery, can’t recall now) and just stuck with them as I then knew they were good. I’m sure any of those three recommends would be great….
https://petapixel.com/2023/08/08/sandisk-portable-ssds-are-failing-so-frequently-we-can-no-longer-recommend-them/
@Gavinski my oldest one of these is a few years old. 0 issues. Supply your own nvme:
https://www.amazon.com/ACASIS-Docking-Station-Enclosure-Delivery/dp/B09L4LDXMS?th=1
I agree with the T5 (I have one) recommendation. I used to have a very small 1 TB spinning hard drive I had connected to my iPad Pro but keeping it recognized by iPadOS while the iPP was shut down became far too problematic. I then decided if I couldn't keep everything I wanted on my iPad Pro, I'd offload most of my files to desktop to work on them rather than continue to work with an unreliable solution. I know this doesn't answer your particular problem, but my experience informs me to either get an iPad with more storage, keep less data on the iPad Pro or simply not rely on an external storage solution. I now only have my external drives connected to my desktop and use AirDrop to send files.
Good to know, in which case maybe @Gavinski should maybe consider the Samsung instead.
I've been using T5 and now T7 SSDs for years with my iPad, works fine, no issues at all and highly recommended.
Whoops... Already ordered and will arrive tomorrow. I could always send it back unopened though
I recently got a used T5 500GB for £25 on eBay to store all my Gospel Musician samples. Works great and is powered by the iPad.
At risk of these being famous last words (gotta look for something wooden to superstitiously make contact with now), I only trust Sandisk, every other major brand I had in the past would go wrong. Western digital (EDIT, yes I know, Sandisk is nowadays owned by Western Digital, but that wasn't always so), lacie, seagate etc.
Amongst the DJing community which has been relying on usb drives for use with CDJing/XDJing for the last decade, Sandisk has proven the most reliable,
I currently use a pair of Sandisk Extreme Portable SSD drives.
Only problem though with ios is the not being unmountable/"eject"able screws up it being recognizable next time I plug it in to monterey EDIT possibly because I chose to format ExFAT so it can be cross platform between different devices. and nowadays mac os such as monterey doesn't seem to have the automatic background chkdisk utility stuff which used to auto fix it if you plug it in to mojave/catalina/big sur or windows (which asks if you want to repair it). I find the method of shutting down the ipad in order to safely unplug only works half the time. The other half the drive needs its index repairing.
This is never the case though if I use FAT32 formatted disks, you can plug and unplug as much as you want,, but I'm not going to format a 2TB SSD to FAT32
but, for can't go wrong unpluggable drives with ios, they work.
EDIT: As confirmed by another user here, https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253320101
There's something wrong in Monterey with recognizing and repairing external drives. I don't know if this is just ExFAT, and if APFS would be more robust. iOS messes up the index of ExFAT drives when hot unplugging, and even occasionally when "safely" closing down ios completely in order to unplug the external.
If it's unlikely that you are going to be using files larger than 4GB I would therefore recommend using a drive formatting FAT32 and thus avoid dealing a few times a week with the drive not showing up, otherwise you could be repairing indexes constantly and needing to make use of either windows, linux or an old verison of MacOS to do so.
TLDR: Sandisk
(EDIT, though that petapixel article is food for thought)
EDIT: there are only a few useful guiding one liners for good life, one of them is, if you don't have your data on three different back ups, you might as well say it doesn't exist. so get more than one, whatever it is you get.
(3-2-1 rule)
Sandisk or Samsung
So the big things taking up space for me are PSP2 and Decent Sampler. I know PSP does but does DS work with an SSD? And what would he fast enough to quickly switch between presets as you normally would within the app?
Also can guy still stream samples from the SSD as well? I haven’t used on for an iPad before so I’m not sure exactly how much is possible.
I saw only good ratings online, pretty much, here in Thailand, about the SanDisk Richard recommended. Maybe it was a geography specific faulty batch that caused the bad reviews in the US? It also seems it was mainly the 4TB model that had issues. Anyway, I may find out for myself, perhaps the hard way, because it arrived and I think I will just open and keep it.
If you're willing to be a guinea pig, and don't need it to also be read by windows machines, would you consider using a format for it not ExFAT and we can find out if it ever goes wrong with indexing after using with iOS? As my post above, iOS having no eject functionality, combined with Monterey having no repair index functionality is a complete pain in the DSS, at least with ExFAT. I have no problems with FAT32 drives with iOS.
I just got a Transcend ssd drive. super small which is a big plus, with 512 gb. Just tested once to see how it works on my new device, worked fast and well. Here's an Amazon link but I bought it from a local store.
I don’t have a laptop at the moment so I won’t be doing any kind of reformatting, I’ll just be using it as it comes. But yeah, when it comes to risking losing all my data, being a guinea pig doesn’t sound very appealing lol
There’s a chance you could go into an Apple Store and get your drive formatted?
So just therefore for your info,
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it comes preformatted ExFAT which is the format that I've found is problematic for hot plugging on iOS and is cross platform. Whereas APFS is the most recent apple format. And FAT32 is battle ready, so to speak.
I suspect there will at some point be a problem, because there's no way to eject an ExFAT drive from iOS, the only safe unmount is to shut down iOS, and even then occasionally I've still had that mess up the drive index, where it won't be recognized by iOS next time and from then on until you then plug it in to either windows or a Mac OS at least as old as Big Sur to repair the index, and come back.
This is not an expert opinion of course, just what I've found: Mac Os and iOS are both temperamental about drives formatted for cross platform use, but at least older Mac OS could repair the issues.
Given iOS doesn't have any functionality for reformatting drives, It might therefore be advisable to get anyone else at all to reformat it, whether to APFS or FAT32.
I don't have experience with APFS I'm only presuming because it's Apple's most up to date format and in the past I found Apple specific formats were more reliable albeit limited to the Apple ecosystem.
I know from experience FAT32 continues to be extremely robust, hot plug as much as you like without issues (well, within reason!), albeit no files can be bigger than 4GB on a FAT32 drive, which is kind of limiting.
None of this is to do with the manufacturer as far as I can tell, but iOS and drive mounting, but again I stand to be corrected.
This seems like a good idea.