We’ve recently had an enormous amount of discussion about the performance of external SSDs. One issue that we’ve only touched upon is whether booting from a faster SSD results in a shorter time for an M1 Mac to start up.
I’ve just added to my stable of SSDs a combination that appears to reach maximum Thunderbolt 3 performance, as generally experienced. This is an ORICO SCM2T3 enclosure with a Samsung 980 PRO 2 TB NVMe SSD inside it, at a total cost of around $/€/£400, or $/€/£200 per TB. Orico doesn’t claim an ‘up to’ performance for its enclosure, but it is ‘certified by Intel’ and bears the Thunderbolt mark. The enclosure is claimed to have a JHL6340 (Intel Alpine Ridge) chipset supporting 4 PCIe Gen 3 lanes, which is reported as connecting at a speed of “up to 40Gb/s x1” and a link width of 2. It was tested while connected by a CalDigit 0.8 m Thunderbolt 4 cable to a Thunderbolt 4 port on a Mac Studio Max running macOS 12.4.
I ran two sets of transfer speed tests using Stibium. The first consisted of the standard set of 160 files, totalling just over 50 GB, and returned a write speed of 2.79 GB/s, and read of 2.83 GB/s. In the second, I doubled the number and total size of test files to exceed 100 GB, in case that might exhaust the SLC write cache or induce thermal throttling. As write speed remained at 2.78 GB/s and read at 2.75 GB/s, there was no evidence that larger load had any significant adverse effect on its performance.
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