The list price on a MacBook Pro 15 w/Retina, 16GB, 1TB SSD drive is around $3,000. That's a lot of money. Since 2013, MacBook Pro's have come with NO swappable/fixable/upgradable components. If you are out of warranty and something inside is defective or broken -- you are out of luck. Or so I thought..
I didn't realize it, but the 1TB, $700 SSD drive hard soldered to the motherboard inside my 3 year old laptop was bad. How do I know? Because once I moved my operating system (macos Sierra) to a Samsung T3 (and started running my O/S in tethered mode), there have been 0 crashes.
Sure.. Being tethered is like a ball & chain -- but hey.. the "ball" weighs nothing (and the cable is under no strain). New Life! Now my laptop works great - no speed degradation. For the first time, I can consider selling it at upgrade time(unthinkable with it crashing all the time).
Out of the box I used the software on the special SETUP_T3 partition to set a 16 character password. Once you do that you can treat the drive like any other -- seamless encryption. I formatted it for Apple and cloned my O/S to it. The real partition (encrypted) is INVISIBLE until you run the special software first on the smaller partition (SETUP_T3). Once you enter your password on the Samsung prompt, the SETUP_T3 disk disconnects (rudely -- generating harmless, but unsettling "Disk Not Ejected Properly" message popup).
Quirkiness... the cost of encryption.. From a completely powered off mode, you can't boot into the encrypted partition on the Samsung. Patience! Boot into another drive (in my case the SSD inside my laptop) and run the little program on partition SETUP_T3. I enter my 16 digit password and then restart. After rebooting, the laptop can "see" (find) the data/bootable partition and load the O/S. So each time you power down completely you have a double boot -- but its super fast on an SSD. As long as you don't power down, you can reboot any number of times without entering your Samsung SETUP_T3 password. The speed on my USB 3.0 port is 380MB/s according to a free speed tool. I believe that is half as fast as the Apple SSD "drive" inside my laptop - but not noticable). To give you some idea of what that means.. My old 5400RPM drive goes at about 30MB/s speed (10 times slower than the Samsung T3).
| Hard Drive | 250 GB Solid State Drive |
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