{"id":48899,"date":"2025-08-14T14:31:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-14T18:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=48899"},"modified":"2025-08-15T17:09:42","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T21:09:42","slug":"upgrading-my-macs-external-ssd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/14\/upgrading-my-macs-external-ssd\/","title":{"rendered":"Upgrading My Mac’s External SSD"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently replaced a 4 TB 2.5-inch hard drive with a same-sized SSD, with the goal of making it quieter and faster. Instead, it got much slower. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing wrong with the SSD itself (a Samsung T7<\/a>). The drive tests fine, and I have half a dozen other drives in this family that all work great.<\/p>\n\n

I think the problem is that I put about 3.5 TB of data on it. I was aware that you don’t want SSDs to be super full, but this particular data set grows slowly, so I thought I’d have several hundred GB of free space for the next few years. But I guess that isn’t enough. The drive started out fast at reading and writing, but after filling it up the writes seemed to take forever. Stibium<\/a> benchmarked them as slow as 1.6 MB\/s, but I think they were actually far lower overall.<\/p>\n\n

Samsung doesn’t make a larger T7 or T9, so I ordered an 8 TB SanDisk<\/a>. That should be plenty of space, and I’ve long used the 2 TB version<\/a> of that drive. It’s the only non-Samsung SSD that’s worked reliably for me. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend the new SanDisk, at least not for use with a Mac. It kept spontaneously unmounting in the middle of copying files, whether connected to a Thunderbolt dock (via the provided cable) or to a USB hub. Some Amazon reviews note the same problem, even though it overall has 4.6 stars from 81K ratings. In light testing, it did seem to work when directly connected to my MacBook Pro, but I only have three ports and don’t want to dedicate one to this drive.<\/p>\n\n

I replaced it with a Samsung T5<\/a>, which in theory is slower than the T7, but in actual use it’s much faster than what I had before, and it seems to be reliable.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n