Some backstory: I’ve never regretted a purchasing decision more than not springing for a bigger SSD on my Macbook Pro. 128GB is borderline enough for software dev, but not nearly enough when recording a podcast. It’s a constant dance of deleting increasingly esoteric things via CleanMyMac, and wiping XCode derived data folders. Now I know how 16GB iPhone owners feel.

To make matters worse, there is also no official way to upgrade your Macbook SSD. Also, if the Skylake processors are as good as they’re cracked up to be, I’d be better off putting that money towards a new laptop anyways. So I was in the market for a something I’d have wagered I’d bought my last of: an external hard drive. USB-3 is plenty fast to work directly from, so (as Merlin would say) I figured I’d give it a throw.

A quick search yields familiar and surprisingly cheap results. Nice looking, multi-terabyte drives can be had for less than $100. That’s great and all, but while I may not have sworn off external drives, I have definitely bought my last spinning hard drive. The bad speed, the moving parts, the clicking – oof, no thanks. This left me to look into external SSDs.

After some research, I went with a
Samsung T3 external SSD.

I gotta say: this drive is a very futuristic thing. It’s somewhat pricey ($200 for half a terabyte at the time of this writing), but it’s self-evidently a different class of device than the cheap spinning drives. It’s baffling light and tiny, silent, and insanely fast. I haven’t been as viscerally impressed by a commodity hardware component in years. I transfered about 20GB of files to it in what felt like 30s.

Anyways, it’s not the ideal solution of a big internal SSD, but as a holdover this thing will do just fine.

Update:

I found a case for it, an old wallet. Did I mention this thing is small?