As I try to extract more performance of my aging 2015 Macbook Pro, I finally bought an affordable external SSD to replace my old Seagate external drive to hold cache and video files while I use Adobe Creative Cloud suite to create digital content. Disk space is always a premium so if I can offload some files, without a loss of performance, I’ll be a very happy camper.
Equipment
- Disk speed test tool (free) from Black Magic Design
- Macbook Pro 2015 SP719 with PCIe-based flash storage, USB 3.0
- Seagate 1TEAPF-500 4TB
- Samsing Portable SSD T5 1TB
Results
My disk speed test results, on USB 3.0 showed that I get approx 5x’s improvement on my old Seagate SATA drive, comparable write speeds to my internal drive but a big difference on read…. maybe the value of an internal cache… The Samsung supports USB 3.1 and a max speed of 540MB/s so if you have newer computer, you may get a faster read/write than I did. As that’s as geeky as I’m interested in going… I’ll leave it there with my curiosity satisfied!
Next on my list is to try it out in a real world scenario!
Tests

Max speed claimed to be 120 MB/s but I got a fraction of that in my speed test.

