I got the Hagibis early this year and it has rocked. It is a Thunderbolt 4 drive and with the very fast Samsung 990 Pro, it can do 3GBps read and write easily. Saturating the 40Gbps Thunderbolt 4.
It was about $120, but now you can get it for $60 from Aliexpress so the progress has been crazy. The main issue with it is that actually getting the back cover off is nearly impossible. I ended up breaking the little plastic tabs, so I need to duct tape it together. Also, the internal fan is super noisy and grinding.
So on to the next, the new Thunderbot 5 enclosures are out, but they were expensive at $300 each, but with Black Friday, the Anyoyo TB502Pro dropped to $210 and I wanted to see if I could get an external drive as fast as the internal one on my MacBook Pro M4 Max.
Now the price of SSDs has skyrocketed, so now a 4TB SSD is over $330 (it was $220 last year!), so I just poppsed the old Samsung 990 Pro and did the measurements. I was hoping that the speed would be good and it was. As usually, the smaller file speeds are dominated by the short Queue Depth, so there is no parallism in the fetches
| Seq/Rnd QD | Read (MBps) | Write (MBps) |
|---|---|---|
| Seq 1M QD32 | 6951 | 6107 |
| Seq 1M QD1 | 4055 | 5086 |
| Rnd4K QD64 | 511 | 128 |
| Rnd4K QD1 | 44 | 282 |
Also the fan can mercifully be switched off manually and the case is easy to take on and off. The big tradeoff is that it is quite a bit bigger than the Hagibis.
Most folks are not going to need this much performance, so the current very inexpensive Hagibis is a much better buy.
You can get this on $210 on Amazon or what looks like the same drive which is the Acasis is $210 on Aliexpress. Right now there is a $25 coupon, so you can get it for $185 on Amazon for Cyber Monday.
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