I’m looking for a portable SSD drive for my Macbook Pro. It’s an older model, being the 15" retina, mid 2015, but even though it’s begin to show signs of ageing, it still does what I need it to.

Which is mostly hobby audio recording/production. As it has a fairly limited 250gb internal SSD, I have to make use of external drives for archive files and time machine backups.

At the moment, I have offloaded my Logic Pro sounds library, as well as the numerous sample packs, project files, and plugins, onto an external HDD to save space, but as it is an 8TB powered HDD, really I would rather just keep it as my home archive/backups (the reason I bought it), instead of carrying it around as part of my portable recording setup. Which always feels a little too risky.

Does anyone have any recommendations for external SSDs that would suit my purpose? And should I stick with USB 3, or should I be looking into Thunderbolt connections for working off of? (I am a little dim when it comes to this stuff)

I would likely only need 250gb at minimum, but in the region of 500/1TB would give me some extra wiggle room.

  • tychosmoose@lemm.ee
    3·
    6 months ago

    For flexibility and size I like external m.2 enclosures. I have some from Sabrent, Orico and Rosewill. Of them all the Rosewill is the smallest, has the nicest build quality, and seems to dissipate heat the best.

    So I would recommend a Rosewill 9SIA072GJ92919, and add an NVMe SSD of your choice.

    I think your MacBook is Thunderbolt 2, so you won’t get full speed but it should still be plenty fast. And this enclosure will give you TB3 speeds if you upgrade your PC later.