FLEDGING SHELL THUNDERBOLT SSD: SUPER FAST AND NOW WITH COOLING
Fledging has redesigned its Shell Thunderbolt SSD to excellent effect. With a new larger form factor, an honest-togoodness fan, plus plenty of venting to circulate the extra air, it no longer feels startlingly hot to the touch after heavy use. Running cool means no thermal throttling and consistent 2Gbps-plus speeds. The Shell Thunderbolt is also cheaper than Samsung’s popular X5 once you reach
1TB of capacity.
DESIGN
The Fledging Shell Thunderbolt is allmetal and colored in approximately the
same hue as your average late-model Mac. It measures approximately 3.75 inches long by 2.5 inches wide by just over 0.5 inches thick, and weighs a few ounces. I personally like the feel and heft—if you want something flimsy and plasticy, look elsewhere.
You access the motherboard and M.2 NVME slot by removing four small Philips screws and the bottom plate. Fledging thoughtfully provides a screwdriver for this—a normal-size household one won’t fit the rather small indents. One screw secures the SSD in place.
With the bottom open, you’ll see the aforementioned fan, which was present in the far slower Fledging Shell USB drive (fave.co/3w818ei) but missing in the original Thunderbolt model (fave. co/3vvju4j). (That was a puzzler, as Thunderbolt allows faster performance and therefore produces a lot more heat.) The new shell is also larger, which means more air for cooling, and there is plenty of venting so the air can circulate freely.
PERFORMANCE
You can put any SSD in any capacity you wish in the Fledging Shell Thunderbolt. I tried two. Fledging provided a 256GB WD SN750 (fave.co/3ahtuwl), but that wasn’t capacious enough to allow full write speed. I went with a 1TB Aura P12 (fave. co/3jtpnwl) for no other reason than that it was at the top of my stack of review units. Numbers were just about as high as you’ll see over Thunderbolt 3: 2838Mbps reading and almost 2394Mbps writing on sister publication Pcworld’s testbed under Crystaldiskmark 6.
Blackmagicdesign’s Disk Speed didn’t reach quite those heights when running on a 2019 Macbook Pro, but speeds were still
well over 2Gbps—nice, and on par with the Samsung X5 (fave.co/2tdjglx).
Thanks to the fan and the other thermal measures, the new Fledging Shell Thunderbolt runs almost cool to the touch—fledging claims at 30 degrees Celsius (85 degrees Fahrenheit), which was only a little over the ambient temperature in the testbed. As noted, the older, smaller non-fan was uncomfortable to the touch after heavy use.
Comparatively, OWC’S $80 Envoy Express (fave.co/3jucoum) is slothful, writing at around 1250Mbps and reading at 1350Mbps. That’s not bad, but not close to the Shell. The Express might still be the better product if you’re leveraging an older, slower NVME SSD (for instance, x2 PCIE) that can’t take advantage of the Shell’s greater bandwidth. Under any other scenario, the Shell’s the one to go with.
BOTTOM LINE
The Fledging Shell Thunderbolt costs a cool (pun intended) $145 without an NVME SSD. With midrange 500GB NVME SSDS starting around $70 and Samsung’s 500GB X5 $199 on Amazon, the Shell doesn’t make sense at lower capacities. However, once you hit 1TB, you start saving money. A decent 1TB NVME SSD costs around $120 (so the cost with the Shell is $265), and a 2TB around $180 (total $325). The X5 costs $400 at 1TB and $600 at 2TB. At those capacities, the Shell Thunderbolt is easily the better bargain.
Note that Fledging sells the Shell Thunderbolt populated as well: $190 for 256GB, $250 for 512GB,
$300 for 1TB, and $400 for 2TB. Ask about the drive included. The WD SN750 (fave. co/3ahtuwl) our test unit included is fast enough, but opt for 512GB or higher if you want top write speeds. ■