You might save a couple of bucks at the 2TB level, but the resulting device would hardly fit in your pocket. By the time you add an enclosure (as far as I’m aware there are no “portable” Thunderbolt 3 NVMe/PCIe enclosures available), you’d be somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 to $500. If it helps, that’s actually not as “Apple-priced” as it looks a bare 1TB Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSD goes for around $300. The X5 is a blazingly fast and expensive drive: $400 for 500GB, $700 for 1TB, and $1,400 for 2TB. The X5 is now the portable drive for multimedia pros, or anyone who doesn’t like to wait for their files to copy-if you can afford it, and of course, have Thunderbolt 3. And for a while, the path to external storage nirvana was a bit of a rocky road-but the bumpy ride is over now thanks to Samsung’s Portable SSD X5, a ready-made NVMe over Thunderbolt 3 storage solution that delivers blazingly fast 2GBps-plus read and write speeds Once Apple finally introduced support for third-party NVMe drives in macOS 10.12 Sierra, NVMe over Thunderbolt storage became only a matter of time.
