Oyen Digital U34 Bolt 8TB (USB4 40Gbps) NVMe Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) Portable SSD, Up to 2800MB/s

Woah this thing is fast! It's still 30-50% slower thanTested on my MBP M2 Max and a Mac Studio M1 using 5GB (large file) setting using blackmagic's testing tool (avail. on the app store). The picture is the MBP but about same results for the Studio (though note that you have to use the ports at the back; the ones at the front only allow transfer up to a little over 300Mbps)Cable is provided (that's important). The drive comes formatted as HFS+.First screenshot is with the original HFS+ partition, second is after re-formating as APFS. HFS is for compatibility with older MacOS pre-Sierra and is less optimal for SSDs, especially for smaller files. Also while APFS is not PC-compatible, neither is HFS so there is little to gain for keeping it as HFS for the regular Mac user.Other big plus: the drive is small (basically the part not covered by the rubber thing in the middle is slightly smaller than a credit card in surface, so the whole thing is just a nudge wider than a credit card) and relatively thin. Fits in a jeans pocket like a pretty full wallet would (not that I would carry it like that, but it means it fits easily in a front pocket of a backpack)NOTE:External SSDs have a bad tendency of failing (just bought this after my Kingston failed within 6mo - granted manufacturer warranty is good for 3 years for these type of devices) so will come back in ~6mo to confirm everything is fine.

This is (at least) my fourth Oyen Digital drive. They are blazingly fast and don’t get hot. I’ve used others (and still have them), but each has had issues or doesn’t make 8TB. The Sabrent, which are more compact, run extremely hot (so hot they are hard to touch). I love the mini Sandisks, but one failed on me early on. I’ve since read other warnings on those. (All drives will fail at some point, but that one was not old - and I was able to reformat it, so I don’t rely on it.) In all, the Oyen Digital drives have proven to be reliable in the long run, fast, and reasonably small and durable. And they don’t get hot (just warm, as you’d expect).

Here are performance tests of (a) this product, (b) mac mini m4 internal hard drive, (c) external 2.5" mechanical hard drive from a few years ago via USB-C.As you can see this external NVME drive is faster than even the internal drive, and 50x faster than a mechanical drive.I bought this specifically to use with the base Mac Mini m4 with its very small internal storage. Initially I tried a mechanical drive to see if I could manage. But it was absymally slow trying to manage my photo library on it.And I bought the Mac because I wanted to use its AI to catalog the people in my photos. I did not find a user friendly, accurate Windows software for this to use on my gaming PC. So decided to buy a mac.

I have the 2tb version and it's connected to the thunderbolt port of a mac mini M4 pro. Photo of the speed test attached, because I would not have believe it. Insane. This thing is ridiculously fast. Definitely pro level on a budget and most certainly worth the money. Yes, a T7 will give you amazing everyday speeds and yes, it's ALL dependent on the connection and the OS speed, but if you want blazing, future proof speed, this is it.

I just got the drive (8TB U34 Bolt) , reformatted it to APFS.I used the cable that came in the box (although I bought another one just in case, a dedicated tb4 cable as I read it might be slow with the original cable.)Used black magic to test the speed and wow!Write 3083 read 2897 !!!!Now I need to see how it works when actually using it, I bought it to backup a MacBook Pro Max 16” 8TB (128Gb RAM).But really impressed with the speed.I wish 8TB NVME would be cheaper but I guess you get what you pay for and my other option was to get a WD SN850X 8TB NVmE and put it in an enclosure, would have probably cost 200 less but WD said they can’t guarantee it would work, although it should but it needs to be connected to a motherboard.I don’t want to take any risks and the casing on this U34 feels solid.

SuperfastNo noiseHigh quality

The drive looks well built and also very fast. I trusted the positive reviews... Problem is that it lasted only 3 days.. from my standpoint utterly unreliable. The problem happened when I was writing some metadata on some pictures and suddenly the drive locked itself in read mode. The drive can still be mounted and the data previously written on the disk is readable but only in read mode. Impossible to delete any file, to format or erase any partition also at low level because the drive report I/O errors. So I find myself in the situation where I have 350G of sensitive material that cannot be erased before returning and at the same time the drive cannot be used anymore because all writing is blocked due to the I/O errors. Support didn't have any tool to do an internal diagnosis of the drive, just suggested, low level partitioning from Windows or Linux with Parted Magic which works as a dedicated bootable Linux distribution that I did but with no success as the HW failed. I would never trust it for any serious workload.

the drive is fast but for some some reason it ships with a cable that doesn't support fast speeds. Had to order a thunderbolt cable separately