Looking for insight on SSD's for my 2018 mbp

SanDisk is good. I use the SanDisk Extreme Portable myself- but a high quality SSD in 8 TB or more will run you anywhere from $800 to $1,800. If you see a drive around $100 that advertises 8 TB of storage- it's almost certainly an HDD, not an SSD. You probably don't need that much SSD storage, though. I would recommend 2, maybe 4 TB as your main drive. If you do believe you need that much, OWC has some good choices here (but don't expect much for $200).

You'll likely want an HDD for computer backups and storage, too- the Mercury Elite Pro is a fine choice, and is configurable up to 18 TB (but twice your drive storage should be plenty).

Of course, nobody knows exactly what you need except you, so go with what you need!

I like Samsung's T7. We have seven and all have been performing flawlessly for about two years.

Whatever brand you settle on, don't install their software unless it enables a security feature such as the Samsung T7 touch model.

8TB in a quality SSD will likely not be possible with a $200 budget, A 2TB Samsung T7 is over $200

I wouldn't recommend any bargain SSDs - especially if they don't have any recognizable brand name. I'm even skeptical of companies like Kingston, Patriot, or Silicon Power - at least when it comes to SSDs.

The big deal with SSDs is that if they fail, there's almost nothing you can do to try and recover the data. So choose well. I have a preference for WD/SanDisk but that's me.

I agree with ku4hx's reply. I have two Samsung T7 SSDs and have not had any issues over the last two years. IMHO, they give excellent performance at a reasonable price. and according to Blackmagic Disk Speed test, they are almost twice as fast as the T5 SSDs.

I've use Samsung SSD's for some time. Currently using the T7 2TB as my Time Machine backup device. I also had a T5 and the T7 is indeed considerably faster as jeffreythefrog suggests.

I might have overstated it by saying "almost impossible". However, "extremely difficult" is probably more like it. They do fail gradually in terms of wear. Each time a block is erased, it adds to wear and a lot of the newer QLC (4 bits per transistor) SSDs are only rated for 1000-2000 erase cycles or even less. However, these supposedly should last the average user 20 years at least.

But there can be random SSD failures, such as the wear leveling tabled being corrupted. If that happened I don't really think there's much that could be done to recover data. So it's important to have anything backed up.

https://www.datanumen.com/blogs/data-recovery-ssd-difficult-hdd/

On the mechanical hard disk drive, data is passed from the controller to the disks magnetically and written to the drive as bits on the platter. Therefore, to read the data, just return to the same location and read magnetic orientation of the bit. In comparison, solid state drive store data more complexly. So as to block flash chip from wear and tear, the location of data stored is always changing. Therefore, in data recovery, it is more difficult to locate the data on solid state drive.

CMartinezFamily wrote:

I ended up getting the t7 2tb but already installed the software before I read this. What is the downside to this

when you use software from just about any manufacturer for their storage device you run the risk of that same software not being compatible with macOS updates / upgrades. it can cause the software to stop working. at best this will cause you a headache. at worst it can render your data inaccessible. it is always best to use disk utility to erase and format a drive before use to remove any preloaded software.

and is it encryptable without the Samsung software included on it?

yes, you can encrypt the data using apple's file vault.