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Comment by LarsDu88 | Hacker News Reader

Samsung T5 SSD, a short USB c cable, and a sticker pocket to attach it to my 2016 MacBook.

Why get gouged by apple on storage when you can just duct tape an SSD to your laptop?

If you pick the larger built in storage you end up with faster on device storage since they put more physical chips on and it acts like a raid 0

Heck yeah. I do this too. I honestly like the slightly nerdy frankenstein look.

    sticker pocket

Can you recommend a sticker pocket? I looked, and I'm not sure which ones might be suitable for holding a hard drive to a laptop.

What I've always done is: a clear acrylic ~$15 shell for the MacBook. Which is something I do anyway. And then I velcro-tape the drive to that shell.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B2R8CPWH?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B2R8CPWH?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_...

It's kinda funny that you can buy a 256 GB SSD for less than the price of this sticker-pocket, usb cable combo. My Macbook has a 256 GB internal SSD that can barely handle installing both the OS and XCode at the same time!

Ah, thanks! Really appreciate it! Looks neat. And you're happy with it? No chance of the drive sliding out?

It's pretty secure. You can honestly save money be going with the stock USB c cable and duct tape, but I prefer the aesthetics of the pocket and short cable

lol, I use velcro tape, not duct tape.

https://www.amazon.com/VELCRO-Brand-Industrial-Strength-Thic...

Although duct tape sounds pretty amazing now that you mention it. If somebody walked into a hacker meetup with a drive duct taped to their laptop I'd assume they were pretty awesome.

I’m hoping there will eventually be a slim profile Thunderbolt 4 flash drive that I can just leave plugged in to my M1 Pro MacBook.

It won’t be nearly as fast, but you could easily have a slim fit storage device in the SD slot. You’d want some microsd to sd adapter made specifically for the MacBook.

That would get you a TB of storage.

I've done that, but there is a caveat. All SD cards are optimized for sequentional read/write (photos/videos) and are very slow for random access. In real life scenarios it can become very slow and sometimes the bandwidth wouldn't be enough for HD videos to load normally.

are you limited by the USB bus throughput rate vs the internal SATA bus?

can second, that thing is fast!

Do you know the difference between the T5 and the T7? From what I can tell, the T7 has faster transfer speeds, but is noticeably cheaper online. What's up with that?

T7 is supposed to be more durable/drop safe? The T5 has a slimmer profile which I enjoy

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