My daughter asked us to find still photographs of a friend of hers.  I came to realize that I had digital photographs spread around in a lot of devices.  I have a very large collection of hard drives, USB finger drives, old cell phones, etc.  I also realized that I had taken lot of super 8 movies and DVD movies.  It stands to reason that all this effort would be lost if I could not devise a method for passing these treasures on to my children.  I already had subscribed to the Adobe suite of products and in that package is Photoshop, Lightroom Classic and Lightroom.  I wanted a solid state hard drive to store the sill images and a larger SSD to store the movies.  While I was at a local computer store buying a bluetooth headset I mentioned to the salesman that I also needed a really good SSD drive.  I wanted a 2TB and my son recommended that I get a Samsung.  The salesman took a look at his stock on hand and recommended the Samsung 2TB SSD T5.  I purchased it because he showed me the Internet reviews that gave this drive a really high score.  But, at home trying to get this drive to work with my Macintosh laptop running Big Sur Version 11.4 the drive really showed problems.

Good:

• Very small.  I was shocked to see a 2 TB so tiny!
• Comes with two USB cables.  The first cable is your normal USB interconnection to your computer.  I think the second cable can be used to interface with your cell phone, not sure.

Bad:

• The drive worked with the format but I changed the  installed format to Mac OS Extended.  Then the drive failed to work.  I spent days trying to get the drive to work with any format but it appeared to be lost.  I returned the drive to the store and got my money back.
• The management software was awful because I could not remove it’s desktop window and that application window took up a lot of space.

Caution Note:  Some hard drives offer security protection such as password or even finger print to gain access to the drive contents.  I reasoned that I had no reason to protect our photographs.  More importantly, I do NOT want to impede any family member from opening the hard drive for any reason!  The whole idea is to share the contents.  

I researched for a while why the Samsung SSD T5 would not work and found a number of Internet reports that blamed the new Macintosh operating system Big Sur. 

I then knew that I had to find a SSD that would run on a Mac.  I finally decided upon two possibilities after hours of  Internet research.  Here is my favorite review:

https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/best-ssd-mac-3600870/

• LaCie
• SanDisk Extreme

I could not find any LaCie selling for a low price.  I finally found that COSTCO was selling the 1 TB SSD at a local COSTCO store and I rushed over and picked up their last one.  It took three store staff about one hour to find it because it was placed in a rather obscure location (being the last one).  This SanDisk is no longer being supplied in the local stores, I was told. But, COSTCO was selling the SanDisk Extreme 2TB SSD from their web site.  I also purchased that one to store my movies.  Both of those hard drives were being sold at significant discounts.

As soon as I connected the SanDisk 1 TB SSD to my laptop I formatted it for Mac OS Extended and it has worked perfectly.  Also, I do not see any annoying SanDisk computer screen application appear.  The hard drive just works.  The 1 TB drive came with a carabiner clip.

 

Note that the cable that comes with the SanDisk appears to have the same connectors at both ends.  That is NOT the case.  One end has very small tabs. This end needs to be inserted into the USB adapter as shown in the image below.

 

 

I then discovered hard shell cases for the SanDisk SSD.  I purchased one for each SSD.  

 

 

Put up July 1, 2021