[Darryl Ramm]

Ah not so fast. Lots of acronyms and misleading and dishonest Glyph marketing being thrown around here.

You likely want to get a Samsung T5.

You have USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5 Gbit/s aka USB 3.0) on you iMac. The Samsung T5 SSD is a USB 3.1 Gen 2 (aka 10 Gbit/s)drive... it's already faster than the port it will connect to on the iMac... but internally the T5 is only a SATA 600 Mbit/s SSD drive. Which will bottleneck a little past the USB 3.1 Gen 1/USB 3 speeds anyhow.

Now to the utter dishonesty of marketing that Glyph is doing with that Atom SSD. It is *not* a Thunderbolt drive, it's a USB 3.1 Gen 2 drive.... exactly the same interface as the Samsung T5. And it likewise has a SATA SSD inside of if. There is nothing Thunderbolt here, except Glyph seem to be using the claim that since a USB-C connector that has Thunderbolt will also have USB included on it and so work with this drive.... that is just absolutely misleading, and dishonest marking from Glyph. And there goes many years of building up a trusted brand in the audio community, just pissed away by some ****tard.

If you want a real Thunderbolt 3 SSD drive. You would get a Samsung X5 or a Sonnet Fusion Thunderbolt 3 (stupid name, nothing to do with Apple awful fusion hybrid HDD/SSD stuff)....

.... BUT DON'T DO THAT...you only have a Thunderbolt 2 interface on your iMac. Thunderbolt 3 drives are typically not backwards compatible with Thunderbolt 1 and 2 host interfaces. Yes I know lots of other Thunderbolt 3 peripherals are, and adapters like Apple's Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter are bidirectional and can do that... with certain peripherals... but Thunderbolt 3 drives are not one of those periperals. And Sonnet and Samsung state that clearly for the drives mentioned above.

Now even if the dishonestly marketed Glyph drive had a Thunderbolt 2 port on it so you could connect to your iMac, it would be still running at slow SATA 600 Mbit/s internal speeds because that's all the onboard SSD controller is. And many other cheap "Thunderbolt" drives also use a SATA controller and give no better performance that USB 3.1 Gen2, or maybe even Gen 1. If you want faster than SATA on Thunderbolt or what I'd consider "real Thunderbolt" drives you need PCIe SSD controllers, and more recently they will all be NVMe as well (more efficient than the older AHCI interface spec). That's what the Samsung X5 or Sonnet Fusion Thunderbolt 3 use, NVMe/PCIe over Thunderbolt 3, but again since they are Thunderbolt 3 they are not compatible with your iMac. Older Sonnet Fusion Thunderbolt 2 drives used PCIe/NVMe as well and were compatible with your iMac, but I doubt you'll find them still available. You could also use an expansion chassis and insert some M.2 SSD drives, but all that effort is unlikely worth it here unless somebody really needed maximum posible performance. Just get a Samsung T5.

I have multiple of the T5 and X5 drives and they work very well. Biggest concerns for me are the USB-C connectors not being very secure/bump proof. On an iMac I might consider velcroing etc. the drive to the back of the iMac, out of the way of being bumped.

Please do not give your money to dishonest vendors like Glyph.