VectoTech Rapid 16TB USB SSD review: Uber vast, decently fast

Best Prices Today: Rapid External SSD USB-C Portable Solid State Drive

SSDs have an issue: relatively low capacities. VectoTech’s Rapid 16TB provides a solution, albeit for quite a bit of cash. Being SATA-based, it’s not as fast as most external SSDs. But for performance, portability, and reliability, even a SATA SSD beats the heck out of a hard disk drive (HDD).

The Rapid is a thin and relatively svelte 5.15 by 3.15 by 0.4-inch rectangle styled in silver with a black bumper running around the edge. It’s pretty good-looking, in my book.

The internals are SATA-based and the bus is 10Gbps USB. NVMe SSDs are faster. But you might remember (you might not) that it was SATA SSDs that freed the world from the slothful seek and load times that HDDs suffer. And lest that seem unfair to HDDs, those are what freed us from floppies and tape.

Being only decently fast, the Rapid’s most attractive selling points by far are ruggedness and capacity. SSDs are not prone to mechanical damage as hard drives are, and you simply can’t get 16TB of SSD storage in a form factor this small anywhere else, as far as we’re aware.

Even small NVMe RAID enclosures (NVMe currently tops out at 8TB per drive) are generally larger and thicker. Forget HDDs, even 2.5-inch models (which currently top out at 6TB) are significantly fatter than the Rapid, and 3.5-inch models (up to 36TB) are positively huge by comparison.

VectoTech Rapid price

Hang onto your hats–actually, your wallets, dear readers. While the Rapid is $129 for 2TB (not half bad!), $229 for 4TB (not bad either!), it’s $1,699 for 16TB. Yowser! Priced [er terabyte, that’s $64.50, $57.25, and $106.18, respectively. A hefty premium for having it all in one box.

Those prices are almost exactly those of the bare V-MAX SATA 6Gbps SSD that’s inside, though that drive is also available in an $799 8TB version

VectoTech Rapid performance

Compared to an HDD, the VectoTech Rapid is very fast. Compared to even slow 10Gbps SSDs, that would be, not so much. Around 500MBps to 550MBps both reading and writing. But that’s sustained throughput and only part of the story.

The VectoTech Rapid is an SSD, and even SATA SSDs have fast seek times, up to a thousand times quicker than HDDs. Again, it was SATA that freed computers from deadly slow boot and load times, not NVMe.

While I didn’t have other drives to chart the Rapid against, I did send it through PCWorld’s suite of tests. As SSD rated the seeks as between 0.04 and 0.7 milliseconds. Hard drives are generally anywhere from 10 to 12 milliseconds.

I had no other external SATA SSDs to compare the Rapid simply because they’re exceedingly rare these days. But while I didn’t create charts, note that in the case of SATA, real-world transfers are very close to what you see in the three synthetic benchmarks. It’s only when you get to NVMe that the operating systems can’t keep up. Alas, while there are remedies for slothful operating system transfers in Windows, I’ve yet to find any for macOS.

That said, there’s a clone of an early version clone for macOS of the FastCopy utility discussed in the article linked above. It’s called RapidCopy and is available in the App Store. Alas, in my tests on my M4 Max Studio, it didn’t offer any significant improvement over Finder. Your experience may vary.

Note that I tested only the 16TB version of the Rapid so I can’t vouch for the speed of the lower capacity models of the drive. It’s quite likely the same or ballpark, but run a couple of benchmarks upon purchase of one of the lower capacity SKUs to make sure.

Should you buy the VectoTech Rapid?

Capacity being your main concern, the 16TB Rapid is the only way to get that much storage in a single external SSD, SATA or no. At least in such a svelte form factor. I can’t say 100 percent yes because of the price, but, if the convenience and capacity outweigh monetary factors for you, by all means go for the 16TB. For smaller capacities, I’d opt for one of the faster, like-priced or cheaper alternatives.