The one Samsung deal every Apple pro should grab on Black Friday
- nov
- 28
For external storage almost as fast as your internal, the Samsung X5 is the best damn SDD drive for your pro Mac needs.
Sure, you can get a 16-inch MacBook Pro — and even save a few bucks this Black Friday — with up to 8 terabytes of SSD now. But if you prefer 13-inch MacBook Pros or Airs, or your current 15-inch doesn't have anywhere nearly that much capacity on board, allow me to introduce you to your next best storage friend: The 2 TB Samsung X5.
Even if you have a ton of internal storage, once you get used to the speed of modern MVMe SSD, you're not going to want to move files back and forth any other way.
Warp-Speed Storage
Samsung X5 SSD
The one Samsung your Apple will love.
You can get cheaper hard drives and even SSDs to backup and transfer files to and from your Mac, but you can't really get faster. Especially not at this price.
Traditional SSDs feel slow. Old platter HDD… frozen. That's especially if and when you're traveling. But, with read/write speeds of up to 2,800MB/s and 2,300MB/s respective, the Samsung X5 turns hours of staring at that stupid progress bar into barely enough time to get a good cup of coffee. Like, pour-over good.
I picked up one of these admittedly strange-looking little packages last year when I needed a faster way to backup and transfer Final Cut Pro X projects from a 2 TB MacBook Pro. And wow, howdy, did it do that job.
It's Thunderbolt 3, which means transfers are are fast as they can possibly be. And, yeah, it gets hot. Like all-caps HOT. But, like the goofy design, none of that impedes the jaw-dropping speed at which it can throw files back and forth to the Mac. (Thanks to USB-C and the new Files app, you can even use it on your iPad Pro with iPadOS 13.)
When I'm traveling, I need speed when backing up and offloading video. The X5 gets hot, and the design is all shades of awkward, but the convenience is absolutely worth it. I paid $1400 for the 2 TB version it when it was first announced but now you can get it for just $799.
It doesn't look like it'll drop any lower for Black Friday, but it's low enough I'm probably going to grab another one anyway.
Unless you folks get them all first.