34 MACWORLD AUGUST 2021
MACUSER REVIEW: FLEDGING SHELL THUNDERBOLT SSDFledging provides everything you need with the Shell Thunderbolt,
including one of those rather pricey Type-C T3 cables.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