5 ms·

Why good external SSDs are faster with Apple Silicon

117 points by ingve 3y ago

transpute 3y ago
OWC 1M2 USB4: finally we get a 40Gbps external storage bus that can work across AMD, Intel and Apple, for both SSD and JBOD (M.2->PCIe->SAS).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
dzonga 3y ago
external ssd's are good if you have multiple machines. you can just plug in / out your primary drive say a ubuntu desktop, a macbook air and a windows laptop. yeah file formats becomes a hinderance -- but they all can read exFAT at decent performance.
- tentacleuno 3y ago
  While we're here, are there any eHDD standards (and devices) that allow you to plainly read the SATA data from the drive, merely acting as a transport for the SATA connector itself? A fair number of them don't allow you to read SMART, for instance (I think this is terrible for a good number of reasons, but alas...) From what I understand, many eHDDs don't actually do this, instead reading the contents of the drive and exposing them to the computer by essentially emulating a USB flash drive. I would have to sniff the packets to be sure, but this is what I suspect my eHDD caddy is doing. My main reason for wanting this is that, in some cases, it would make reading random drives substantially easier -- I have amassed a collection of HDDs that all have different partition schemes, filesystems, etc., and a fair number of those are unable to be processed by my caddy. This is a very frustrating experience, as a Linux device has some of the best filesystem / partitioning support in the world (and a random £15 caddy is obviously not going to provide very good competition.) On the contrary, having the kernel process the HDD as a block device would most likely place it under marginally more computational stress (as opposed to the drive reading partition tables and filesystems itself), but I believe that's been fairly well-optimized by now.
  - jsheard 3y ago
    The standard you're looking for is UASP, which encapsulates raw SCSI commands over a USB connection. Most newer SATA enclosures should support it, they usually mention UASP in the product description if they do, since it has better performance than the older style which emulated generic USB mass storage.
    - tentacleuno 3y ago
      Ahh, Hacker News never fails to disappoint. Are there any ones you would recommend? A quick Amazon search yields a ton of rando-name products that I don't place much faith in -- the only brand name I could find was Sabrent[0], but that's only 2.5" and I suspect it's running the drive at 5v. My current one (which I believe is WD) has long since been liberated from its chassis, but it does have a separate 12/2 power supply as opposed to running the drive on the 5v USB connector. On a positive note, I very much suspect the USB-C connector of being miles better than the Micro USB 3.0 interface my current caddy uses. In my experience, a bit of external force can easily encourage the connector out of the port. > (and a random £15 caddy is obviously not going to provide very good competition.) P.S. re this, I can sort of understand it, as the caddy came with a drive -- they clearly had the opportunity to optimize away support for filesystems that they weren't pairing the caddy with. [0]: https://www.amazon.co.uk/SABRENT-enclosure-indicator-tool-free-EC-UASP/dp/B00OJ3UJ2S https://www.amazon.co.uk/SABRENT-enclosure-indicator-tool-fr...
      - jsheard 3y ago
        How about this one from Sabrent? 3.5", USB-B, UASP, external 12v supply. https://www.amazon.co.uk/SABRENT-enclosure-indicator-tool-free-EC-DFLT/dp/B00LS5NFQ2 https://www.amazon.co.uk/SABRENT-enclosure-indicator-tool-fr...
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - formerly_proven 3y ago
      iirc there are/were still issues because SMART is part of ATA but not part of SCSI so you need an extra encapsulation layer - smartmontools has code to send special vendor-defined packets because of this.
- 112233 3y ago
  Even with a single mac, external drive is much cheaper and not much slower than built-in storage, and most importantly can be used to boot macos from it. Meaning, if your mac dies, you plug that drive into another mac and continue working
  - mkesper 3y ago
    Also it's sadly the only storage upgrade option for models where storage is non-user-changeable.
    - jsheard 3y ago
      Which is all of them now, besides the Mac Pro. The super thin MacBook Airs have the excuse that upgradable storage would add bulk at least, but there's really no excuse for a brick like the Mac Studio not having M.2 slots.
      - blackoil 3y ago
        Have you seen the profit margin on disc upgrades. If given slots, no one will buy higher tier.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- jasode 3y ago
  >say a ubuntu desktop, a macbook air and a windows [...] -- but they all can read exFAT at decent performance. Fyi, it's somewhat common knowledge in tech circles that exFAT is an unreliable way of permanently sharing data between different operating systems: https://www.google.com/search?q=exfat+corruption+macos+windows https://www.google.com/search?q=exfat+corruption+macos+windo... exFAT is ok to use as a secondary file system for transferring/copying data between systems (aka "sneakernet") but not as a critical primary disk drive. EDIT reply to : >the more reliable file system to use if different operating systems need to use it is UDF UDF like exFAT does not have journaling feature in HFS+ and NTFS. Without journaling as a self-check feature, it makes the filesystem very fragile and prone to corruption. Similar to this explanation: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/7609/what-are-the-differences-between-journaling-hfs-and-non-journaling-hfs/7614#7614 https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/7609/what-are-the-... For permanent data sharing between macOS/Windows/Linux, the more reliable setup than exFAT is network shares such as SMB/NFS mounts on a NAS with ZFS/btrfs filesystems. Unfortunately, that costs more money because of the extra hardware. EDIT reply to: >If you just want to share files between 2-3 computers, by far the fastest and cheapest will be to wire the computers together over Thunderbolt. When I researched the idea of daisy-chaining Thunderbolt with mac + Linux + Windows, I ran into stories saying it was not reliable. Example: https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2023/20230213_1022-Thunderbolt-USBC-kernel-panics.html https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2023/20230213_1022-Thun... I could see where Thunderbolt daisy-chaining macos+Windows might work 100% perfectly for some but others have flaky issues because of various interactions of Thunderbolt chipsets, TB dock/hub quality, drivers, etc.
  - mkesper 3y ago
    Which means the more reliable file system to use if different operating systems need to use it is UDF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    If you just want to share files between 2-3 computers, by far the fastest and cheapest will be to wire the computers together over Thunderbolt. Forget the other networks, you just need a couple of high-$ cables.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I use an external drive for my main desktop drive. It is pretty nice to be able plug it into my laptop, and access my desktop /home without even going over the network. But, I never went all the way and got the install set up with drivers for both systems. I think that would be the dream. Only one filesystem to think about. I wonder if there’s some clever overlay way to plug the drive into my laptop, boot off that, have it copy everything over, then unplug the drive, work for a bit, and then have it automatically send it all back next time I plug the drive in…
- Teever 3y ago
  I wish modular support for filesystems in commercial operating systems was something regulated by the government.
rickdeckard 3y ago
Or, for the techy detail and practical advice, the first enclosures which make use of USB4 and are faster are based on a ASMedia ASM2464PD controller chipset. USB4 ASM2464PD SSD ENCLOSURES [1]: These enclosures sustain higher throughputs compared to older Thunderbolt 3 designs which reserved bandwidth for DisplayPort and legacy USB. Real-world peak throughput is ~3.1-3.8GB/s with the latest Gen4 M.2 NVMe SSDs. Many enclosures since 2020 are marketed as “USB4 compatible” but are based on the older Thunderbolt 3 chips, so you need to pay attention to the fine print. [1] https://dancharblog.wordpress.com/2024/01/01/list-of-ssd-enclosure-chipsets-2022/ https://dancharblog.wordpress.com/2024/01/01/list-of-ssd-enc...
- pauljara 3y ago
  I'm piggybacking off this comment in case people want to purchase one of these enclosures after reading your comment. I've tested a couple of these ASM2464PD enclosures since last November. If you buy one of these you're going to want to flash the firmware to at least the latest ASMedia one from January of 2024. This remedies some "random" unmount issues you could run into, particularly on Apple Silicon Macs. In my case, despite purchasing two identical enclosures, one had the disconnect issue and the other did not. But the firmware update has resolved it fully. Unfortunately, you'll need a Windows PC to flash the firmware. Running the flasher under Windows on Parallels didn't work for me. You do NOT need USB4 to flash the device, just a USB 3.2 USB-C port. A USB-C to USB-A cable may work too but I did not test that scenario. Also, if you have the device plugged straight into your USB4 equipped computer, it will run in USB4 mode and you will easily see 3GB+/s benchmarks. If you have it plugged into a USB4/Thunderbolt 4 dock, it will run in Thunderbolt 3 mode. The speeds in TB3 mode will be limited to about 2.7GB/s or the same as Intel JHL7440 enclosures. So it performs no better than Intel Thunderbolt 3 enclosures in that scenario. However, the ASM2464PD enclosures run HOT. I bought a couple of Maiwo enclosures off AliExpress when you couldn't purchase these at retail in North America. If I had to do it again, I'd buy the OWC version. I've heard the OWC enclosure has extra heatsink accommodations to handle the heat. I bet they'll ship the latest firmware too.
prmoustache 3y ago
My experience with SSDs and nvme in usb enclosure is that temperature management is probably a much bigger factor. Even on my old thinkpad USB3.0 ports, performance drop when the drive is hot. I have one drive that I use to run my "works" VM on different computers, and when I am doing IO intensive stuff I can really observe the difference wether the usb casing is open or closed or if I put a ventilator in front of it.
dimask 3y ago
Apart from what the article explains for TB3 vs USB4 enclosures, there are several additional issues with what connects how in an apple silicon mac. It is a mess to figure out an optimal set of enclosures and ssds for a macbook, as some combinations work better than other in apple silicon, while not having any difference in intel macs. For example, a lot of usb3.1 gen 2 enclosures seem to be recognised as gen1 (5Gb/s vs 10Gb/s). I don't think it is very clear why, but probably having to do with the specific usb controllers. In general, TB controllers seem to be more reliable. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/usb-on-m1-macs-isnt-actually-10gb-s-also-definitely-not-usb4.2269777 https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/usb-on-m1-macs-isnt-act... There are a lot of other factors to consider too, like how many pci-e lanes is dedicated in a usb port, how they may be shared between usb ports etc, eg it seems that some usb ports that are usb3.1 gen 2 are actually limited to ~8Gb/s because of that https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/issues-with-usb-ports-on-m1-max.2355896 https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/issues-with-usb-ports-o... Advice: get an enclosure and ssd that you have seen somewhere in the internet as working with your device.
pier25 3y ago
Yeah TB doesn't go up to 40Gbps for data transfer because there's reserved bandwidth for Display Port. But you can get around 2.5GBps which is plenty for most use cases.
AutoArchiverBot 3y ago
[flagged]
fl0ki 3y ago
> So the fastest you’ll see with your Intel Mac’s Thunderbolt ports is up to 3 GB/s, while a suitable USB4 enclosure running from any Apple silicon Mac should comfortably exceed that if it really does support USB 40Gbps. One of the article's sins is that it mixes units, and accounts for overheads in one case but not the other, but I think it's fair to normalize this to <24 Gbps vs <40 Gbps. Dropping to <10 Gbps USB3 would be even worse. I can imagine someone would notice the difference if it was in the critical path of their workflow such as importing and exporting high-quality video files. I'm not a video editor, but to proactively empathize, if all of my compiles took 2x-4x as long because of IO spec nonsense, I would have plenty of time to form an opinion about it. My takeaway is that, while you already had to benchmark a storage product's performance rather than trust their claims, it appears you also have to benchmark it on the particular host hardware (and likely even specific cables) being used. If the stakes are 2x-4x performance in the critical path of your workflow, it's quite a headache, and will further confound the applicability of third-party reviews. At best it may mean they have to test more combinations at the reviewer's expense, but still leaving many combinations untested at the potential user's expense.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
Why does the author keep switching between Gb/s and GB/s? It's quite jarring.
PeterStuer 3y ago
Had to read this a few times before I got the meaning of the confusing title. The comparison is between a Mac with an Apple M series processor vs an Intel based Mac, using either a Thunderbolt 3 vs a USB4 external enclosure for the (unspecified) SSD. The conclusion is that for the Intel Macs it does not make much of a difference, but for the M series there is a benefit from going USB4. The article is very light on methodology or actual data.
- janandonly 3y ago
  I did find the recommendation for the OWC Express 1M2 very practical, though.
  - nickt 3y ago
    I’ve used the 1M2 with my own NVMe SSD, it’s very nice. Another good option is the Satechi USB4 NVMe SSD Pro Enclosure. Both are fast and reliable.
- swiftcoder 3y ago
  The conclusion is surely more along the lines that: - it's almost impossible to tell a priori what the performance will be, since manufacturers don't document their chipsets properly - a faster drive may be slower on an Intel Mac, due to falling back to USB3
- coldtea 3y ago
  >The article is very light on methodology or actual data. That's because it's not a benchmark, it's an explanation.
  - logifail 3y ago
    > That's because it's not a benchmark, it's an explanation It's certainly an article that uses the word 'may' several times in the text, yet not once in its title.
    - 3y ago

117 points by ingve 3y ago

OWC 1M2 USB4: finally we get a 40Gbps external storage bus that can work across AMD, Intel and Apple, for both SSD and JBOD (M.2->PCIe->SAS).

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

dzonga 3y ago

external ssd's are good if you have multiple machines. you can just plug in / out your primary drive say a ubuntu desktop, a macbook air and a windows laptop. yeah file formats becomes a hinderance -- but they all can read exFAT at decent performance.

tentacleuno 3y ago
While we're here, are there any eHDD standards (and devices) that allow you to plainly read the SATA data from the drive, merely acting as a transport for the SATA connector itself? A fair number of them don't allow you to read SMART, for instance (I think this is terrible for a good number of reasons, but alas...) From what I understand, many eHDDs don't actually do this, instead reading the contents of the drive and exposing them to the computer by essentially emulating a USB flash drive. I would have to sniff the packets to be sure, but this is what I suspect my eHDD caddy is doing. My main reason for wanting this is that, in some cases, it would make reading random drives substantially easier -- I have amassed a collection of HDDs that all have different partition schemes, filesystems, etc., and a fair number of those are unable to be processed by my caddy. This is a very frustrating experience, as a Linux device has some of the best filesystem / partitioning support in the world (and a random £15 caddy is obviously not going to provide very good competition.) On the contrary, having the kernel process the HDD as a block device would most likely place it under marginally more computational stress (as opposed to the drive reading partition tables and filesystems itself), but I believe that's been fairly well-optimized by now.
- jsheard 3y ago
  The standard you're looking for is UASP, which encapsulates raw SCSI commands over a USB connection. Most newer SATA enclosures should support it, they usually mention UASP in the product description if they do, since it has better performance than the older style which emulated generic USB mass storage.
  - tentacleuno 3y ago
    Ahh, Hacker News never fails to disappoint. Are there any ones you would recommend? A quick Amazon search yields a ton of rando-name products that I don't place much faith in -- the only brand name I could find was Sabrent[0], but that's only 2.5" and I suspect it's running the drive at 5v. My current one (which I believe is WD) has long since been liberated from its chassis, but it does have a separate 12/2 power supply as opposed to running the drive on the 5v USB connector. On a positive note, I very much suspect the USB-C connector of being miles better than the Micro USB 3.0 interface my current caddy uses. In my experience, a bit of external force can easily encourage the connector out of the port. > (and a random £15 caddy is obviously not going to provide very good competition.) P.S. re this, I can sort of understand it, as the caddy came with a drive -- they clearly had the opportunity to optimize away support for filesystems that they weren't pairing the caddy with. [0]: https://www.amazon.co.uk/SABRENT-enclosure-indicator-tool-free-EC-UASP/dp/B00OJ3UJ2S https://www.amazon.co.uk/SABRENT-enclosure-indicator-tool-fr...
    - jsheard 3y ago
      How about this one from Sabrent? 3.5", USB-B, UASP, external 12v supply. https://www.amazon.co.uk/SABRENT-enclosure-indicator-tool-free-EC-DFLT/dp/B00LS5NFQ2 https://www.amazon.co.uk/SABRENT-enclosure-indicator-tool-fr...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - formerly_proven 3y ago
    iirc there are/were still issues because SMART is part of ATA but not part of SCSI so you need an extra encapsulation layer - smartmontools has code to send special vendor-defined packets because of this.
112233 3y ago
Even with a single mac, external drive is much cheaper and not much slower than built-in storage, and most importantly can be used to boot macos from it. Meaning, if your mac dies, you plug that drive into another mac and continue working
- mkesper 3y ago
  Also it's sadly the only storage upgrade option for models where storage is non-user-changeable.
  - jsheard 3y ago
    Which is all of them now, besides the Mac Pro. The super thin MacBook Airs have the excuse that upgradable storage would add bulk at least, but there's really no excuse for a brick like the Mac Studio not having M.2 slots.
    - blackoil 3y ago
      Have you seen the profit margin on disc upgrades. If given slots, no one will buy higher tier.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jasode 3y ago
>say a ubuntu desktop, a macbook air and a windows [...] -- but they all can read exFAT at decent performance. Fyi, it's somewhat common knowledge in tech circles that exFAT is an unreliable way of permanently sharing data between different operating systems: https://www.google.com/search?q=exfat+corruption+macos+windows https://www.google.com/search?q=exfat+corruption+macos+windo... exFAT is ok to use as a secondary file system for transferring/copying data between systems (aka "sneakernet") but not as a critical primary disk drive. EDIT reply to : >the more reliable file system to use if different operating systems need to use it is UDF UDF like exFAT does not have journaling feature in HFS+ and NTFS. Without journaling as a self-check feature, it makes the filesystem very fragile and prone to corruption. Similar to this explanation: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/7609/what-are-the-differences-between-journaling-hfs-and-non-journaling-hfs/7614#7614 https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/7609/what-are-the-... For permanent data sharing between macOS/Windows/Linux, the more reliable setup than exFAT is network shares such as SMB/NFS mounts on a NAS with ZFS/btrfs filesystems. Unfortunately, that costs more money because of the extra hardware. EDIT reply to: >If you just want to share files between 2-3 computers, by far the fastest and cheapest will be to wire the computers together over Thunderbolt. When I researched the idea of daisy-chaining Thunderbolt with mac + Linux + Windows, I ran into stories saying it was not reliable. Example: https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2023/20230213_1022-Thunderbolt-USBC-kernel-panics.html https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2023/20230213_1022-Thun... I could see where Thunderbolt daisy-chaining macos+Windows might work 100% perfectly for some but others have flaky issues because of various interactions of Thunderbolt chipsets, TB dock/hub quality, drivers, etc.
- mkesper 3y ago
  Which means the more reliable file system to use if different operating systems need to use it is UDF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format
- jeffbee 3y ago
  If you just want to share files between 2-3 computers, by far the fastest and cheapest will be to wire the computers together over Thunderbolt. Forget the other networks, you just need a couple of high-$ cables.
bee_rider 3y ago
I use an external drive for my main desktop drive. It is pretty nice to be able plug it into my laptop, and access my desktop /home without even going over the network. But, I never went all the way and got the install set up with drivers for both systems. I think that would be the dream. Only one filesystem to think about. I wonder if there’s some clever overlay way to plug the drive into my laptop, boot off that, have it copy everything over, then unplug the drive, work for a bit, and then have it automatically send it all back next time I plug the drive in…
Teever 3y ago
I wish modular support for filesystems in commercial operating systems was something regulated by the government.

rickdeckard 3y ago

Or, for the techy detail and practical advice, the first enclosures which make use of USB4 and are faster are based on a ASMedia ASM2464PD controller chipset. USB4 ASM2464PD SSD ENCLOSURES [1]: These enclosures sustain higher throughputs compared to older Thunderbolt 3 designs which reserved bandwidth for DisplayPort and legacy USB. Real-world peak throughput is ~3.1-3.8GB/s with the latest Gen4 M.2 NVMe SSDs. Many enclosures since 2020 are marketed as “USB4 compatible” but are based on the older Thunderbolt 3 chips, so you need to pay attention to the fine print. [1] https://dancharblog.wordpress.com/2024/01/01/list-of-ssd-enclosure-chipsets-2022/ https://dancharblog.wordpress.com/2024/01/01/list-of-ssd-enc...

pauljara 3y ago
I'm piggybacking off this comment in case people want to purchase one of these enclosures after reading your comment. I've tested a couple of these ASM2464PD enclosures since last November. If you buy one of these you're going to want to flash the firmware to at least the latest ASMedia one from January of 2024. This remedies some "random" unmount issues you could run into, particularly on Apple Silicon Macs. In my case, despite purchasing two identical enclosures, one had the disconnect issue and the other did not. But the firmware update has resolved it fully. Unfortunately, you'll need a Windows PC to flash the firmware. Running the flasher under Windows on Parallels didn't work for me. You do NOT need USB4 to flash the device, just a USB 3.2 USB-C port. A USB-C to USB-A cable may work too but I did not test that scenario. Also, if you have the device plugged straight into your USB4 equipped computer, it will run in USB4 mode and you will easily see 3GB+/s benchmarks. If you have it plugged into a USB4/Thunderbolt 4 dock, it will run in Thunderbolt 3 mode. The speeds in TB3 mode will be limited to about 2.7GB/s or the same as Intel JHL7440 enclosures. So it performs no better than Intel Thunderbolt 3 enclosures in that scenario. However, the ASM2464PD enclosures run HOT. I bought a couple of Maiwo enclosures off AliExpress when you couldn't purchase these at retail in North America. If I had to do it again, I'd buy the OWC version. I've heard the OWC enclosure has extra heatsink accommodations to handle the heat. I bet they'll ship the latest firmware too.

prmoustache 3y ago

My experience with SSDs and nvme in usb enclosure is that temperature management is probably a much bigger factor. Even on my old thinkpad USB3.0 ports, performance drop when the drive is hot. I have one drive that I use to run my "works" VM on different computers, and when I am doing IO intensive stuff I can really observe the difference wether the usb casing is open or closed or if I put a ventilator in front of it.

dimask 3y ago

Apart from what the article explains for TB3 vs USB4 enclosures, there are several additional issues with what connects how in an apple silicon mac. It is a mess to figure out an optimal set of enclosures and ssds for a macbook, as some combinations work better than other in apple silicon, while not having any difference in intel macs. For example, a lot of usb3.1 gen 2 enclosures seem to be recognised as gen1 (5Gb/s vs 10Gb/s). I don't think it is very clear why, but probably having to do with the specific usb controllers. In general, TB controllers seem to be more reliable. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/usb-on-m1-macs-isnt-actually-10gb-s-also-definitely-not-usb4.2269777 https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/usb-on-m1-macs-isnt-act... There are a lot of other factors to consider too, like how many pci-e lanes is dedicated in a usb port, how they may be shared between usb ports etc, eg it seems that some usb ports that are usb3.1 gen 2 are actually limited to ~8Gb/s because of that https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/issues-with-usb-ports-on-m1-max.2355896 https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/issues-with-usb-ports-o... Advice: get an enclosure and ssd that you have seen somewhere in the internet as working with your device.

pier25 3y ago

Yeah TB doesn't go up to 40Gbps for data transfer because there's reserved bandwidth for Display Port. But you can get around 2.5GBps which is plenty for most use cases.

AutoArchiverBot 3y ago

[flagged]

fl0ki 3y ago

> So the fastest you’ll see with your Intel Mac’s Thunderbolt ports is up to 3 GB/s, while a suitable USB4 enclosure running from any Apple silicon Mac should comfortably exceed that if it really does support USB 40Gbps. One of the article's sins is that it mixes units, and accounts for overheads in one case but not the other, but I think it's fair to normalize this to <24 Gbps vs <40 Gbps. Dropping to <10 Gbps USB3 would be even worse. I can imagine someone would notice the difference if it was in the critical path of their workflow such as importing and exporting high-quality video files. I'm not a video editor, but to proactively empathize, if all of my compiles took 2x-4x as long because of IO spec nonsense, I would have plenty of time to form an opinion about it. My takeaway is that, while you already had to benchmark a storage product's performance rather than trust their claims, it appears you also have to benchmark it on the particular host hardware (and likely even specific cables) being used. If the stakes are 2x-4x performance in the critical path of your workflow, it's quite a headache, and will further confound the applicability of third-party reviews. At best it may mean they have to test more combinations at the reviewer's expense, but still leaving many combinations untested at the potential user's expense.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago

Why does the author keep switching between Gb/s and GB/s? It's quite jarring.

PeterStuer 3y ago

Had to read this a few times before I got the meaning of the confusing title. The comparison is between a Mac with an Apple M series processor vs an Intel based Mac, using either a Thunderbolt 3 vs a USB4 external enclosure for the (unspecified) SSD. The conclusion is that for the Intel Macs it does not make much of a difference, but for the M series there is a benefit from going USB4. The article is very light on methodology or actual data.

janandonly 3y ago
I did find the recommendation for the OWC Express 1M2 very practical, though.
- nickt 3y ago
  I’ve used the 1M2 with my own NVMe SSD, it’s very nice. Another good option is the Satechi USB4 NVMe SSD Pro Enclosure. Both are fast and reliable.
swiftcoder 3y ago
The conclusion is surely more along the lines that: - it's almost impossible to tell a priori what the performance will be, since manufacturers don't document their chipsets properly - a faster drive may be slower on an Intel Mac, due to falling back to USB3
coldtea 3y ago
>The article is very light on methodology or actual data. That's because it's not a benchmark, it's an explanation.
- logifail 3y ago
  > That's because it's not a benchmark, it's an explanation It's certainly an article that uses the word 'may' several times in the text, yet not once in its title.
  - 3y ago