Ideally don't take a Sandisk, but really anything else.
this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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Data Hoarder
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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
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I use internal SSDs in external USB enclosures. Typically after upgrading internal SSDs.
For example I have 2TB and 4TB Crucial MX500 SATA drives and 2TB Samsung EVO 970 Plus NVMe drives in external USB enclosures.
Wikibox solution is what I do as well.
But don’t copy everything at once if you’ve got terabytes of data. The ssds get hot and can cause strange issues.
If you get an enclosure, make sure it’s aluminum, so it radiates more heat. There are a few that have fans in them too for those larger backups.
If you improperly eject a disk while the filesystem is in a flux state it doesn't matter which disk you use you're very likely encounter that issue again. More so with some filesystems than others. APFS is for some reason worse in this regard, so best stick with the traditional "HFS+ w/ Journaling" on a Mac.
If you transfer large collections of data you could/ probably should use rsync and not the Finder, preferably in a screen or tmux session. That way any crash of any of any the UI components will not mess up the copy process (even if Terminal.app goes down you'll be able to reconnect to the screen/tmux session with the copy process still doing its thing). Also make sure your external disk has proper power all the time during the process (preferably do not attach another device during that time.)
The T7 series gets very hot under sustained writes, hot enough to be uncomfortable to hold, and as you've found, sometimes hot enough to shut itself down. I have also seen that problem with intermittent writes if the drive is buried under papers, so I make sure that it is on the desk with available airflow near it.
If I'm going to be doing a bulk write to fill up one of my non-Shield T7s, I literally place a metal bowl with ice directly on top of it for the duration of the transfer. But I've found that extreme step is only necessary when I'm writing continuously. YMMV.