Review on Fast & Reliable Transcend 512GB Thunderbolt 💨 Solid State Drive StoreJet 500 for MAC (TS512GSJM500) by Dave Hess

I recently bought a Mac Mini to replace my aging MacBook Pro and bought this external drive to supplement the Mini's limited SSD storage. I already had a 256GB internal SSD drive that I plugged into a USB 3 enclosure for photo storage, but figured the Thunderbolt drive would be faster than the USB 3 drive I put together. I was right and wrong at the same time. The drive looks pretty good, feels solid when held in my hand, and was already formatted in OS X. I connected it with the included Thunderbolt cable and ran some tests. It was a lot faster than my old USB 3 SSD, but didn't come close to what I thought it should be based on Thunderbolt standards. Out of curiosity I downloaded the (free) Black Magic Speedtest and tested all my external drives as well as the internal SSD in my Mini and the results surprised me. All speeds are in MB/s using Black Magic's 5GB load setting. See the data below for a more detailed explanation of these speeds. this is the built in ssd in mac miniusb 3 ssd this is the internal ssd in a usb 3 enclosure transcend 1 this is a transcend drive connected with usb 3 connection transcend 2 this is a transcend drive connected with a thunderbolt connection usb 3 drive this is a new one physical usb 3 (vs ssd) yes some very surprising results, at least for me: the USB 3 connection on the Transcend drive is noticeably faster than the thunderbolt connection for writing and about the same for reading. Read speeds for both are faster than write speeds (which is to be expected), but write speeds for the Mini's internal SSD are faster than read speeds (and it wasn't what I expected). This drive is much faster than the government sold drive that I put in a USB 3 enclosure. This drive is much faster than my physical 1TB drive. While I think this is a very good SSD and I'm happy with it, I'm currently using it with USB 3 instead of Thunderbolt. What I didn't do was compare the speed of this commercial drive to another 256GB commercial drive. This disc may be overpriced but without a second disc sold to compare to, I cannot judge. And I should also mention that this drive doesn't get hot like others have pointed out. Maybe it's because it's only used for storing photos and therefore only for editing photos, but I've never seen this drive get hot.