Use

Because of its fairly long cable and extremely light weight, you may leave the drive dangling off your notebook's plug while walking around, which you would not do with a traditional hard drive. Once connected, the blue activity LED lights up to let you know the drive is ready for use.

Performance

Silicon Power advertises up to 380 MB/s read and 340MB/s write, which are excellent numbers. But digging through their site, it also mentions the following in small print:

The temperature will rise to 38-42°C while the device is under heavy usage, which won't harm your data. If you prolong such use greatly, while backing up files or video editing, for instance, the temperature will rise to 50-52°C; however, the drive's built-in cooling system will adjust the transfer rates to lower the temperature. After the temperature has dropped, transfer rates will again be adjusted for highest possible performance. Every situation mentioned above is completely normal and safe. Please be at ease and make use of them.

That said, the drive did become hot while simply sitting there, connected to the Macbook Air. This is rather surprising as I would not expect such to happen while no data is being written onto or read off the drive. The unit also became warmer than a traditional SATA-based SSD, which begs the question of whether Silicon Power should have invested in a more capable (passive) cooling solution with the Thunder T11.

Blackmagic Disk Speed Test

This test is to figure out whether the drive is capable of hitting its generally advertised performance. Blackmagic Disk Speed Test is a popular app among Macintosh users, and it gauges the speeds of their storage units. As you can see in the table above, the drive manages 230 MB/s write and around 367 MB/s read. While the former is nowhere close to the advertised maximum, read performance is actually quite close. Compared to other traditional drives, seen in the list below, the T11 actually fares extremely well, taking the cake so to speak.

AJA Disk Read/Write Test

AJA System Test contains a disk read/write test intended to figure out the speeds of storage drives while editing videos, or performing similar tasks. Considering the Thunder T11 is a Thunderbolt product, it stands to reason that Apple users will want to know whether this external SSD is a viable product in such a scenario. We pitted the drive against the Macbook Air's internal PCIe SSD, a traditional external USB 3.0 hard drive, an SLC memory-equipped USB flash drive, and a mainstream MLC-based drive. The matrix below shows how the Thunder T11 fared with various file sizes.

AJA Disk Read Test
AJA Disk Write Test