> 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 c

> 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.