After several days testing the latest Express 1M2 enclosure from OWC, I have changed my recommendations for the best external SSDs. Previously I had chosen the relatively reliable Thunderbolt 3 up to 3 GB/s, even though few drives ever seemed capable of achieving that up to. If you’re still needing good performance with an Intel Mac, that makes sense.
But if you need best performance with an Apple silicon Mac, you’re far better off with a high-quality USB 40Gbps enclosure such as OWC’s Express 1M2, which should reliably return over 3 GB/s even through a compatible hub. I much prefer the word over to up to.
Howard Oakley
If you have an Apple Silicon Mac, and you’re looking for an external drive – this is some good advice to follow.
Every time something comes up with the USB standard, I need a refresher because the names are such an arbitrary mess. I suspect will too, so this article contains a usb rosetta stone table, haha.
https://www.tomshardware.com/features/usb-decoded-all-the-specs-and-version-numbers
I was kind of expecting the article to contain more charts and data. It’s fair enough for the author to change product recommendations, but “a picture contains a thousand words” and a chart or even a table could have gone a long way here.
My experience pretty much bears this out. I have a Mac Studio M1 Max, and using one of the Thunderbolt ports with a Orico USB 40Gbps enclosure and a Crucial P5 2TB SSD, I can get nearly twice the performance with the drive as I do on Thunderbolt ports on a Intel NUC 11th gen with the core i9-11900KB. I know it’s literally not comparing Apples to Apples, but for raw data transfer there *shouldn’t* be a difference between USB 4/Thunderbolt 3 from one machine to the next. Yet the Apple Silicon machine allows the drive to saturate the connection, while the Intel machine throttles at about 2.3GB/s, just over half what the Mac can do.
Morgan,
I have a i9-11900k desktop system and the manual claims the fastest usb ports are “3.2 Gen 2×2”, which is only 20gbps, but I guess your NUC may have faster ports on it…
https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/intel-nuc-11-pro-kit-nuc11tnki5-tiger-canyon
Do you get the same result using both ports? I know it’s something I might overlook. The lightning symbol is just a bit thicker on port #2, haha.
This is O/T, but I was watching this video where Jeff was bench marking a DIY RPI NAS with a 2.5gbps adapter using his mac. To his surprise (and mine) the RPI’s network transfer speeds were bottle-necked by his mac PC and not the RPI. The speed his RPI based NAS could deliver was higher when he tested with windows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l30sADfDiM8&t=1838s
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/macos-finder-still-bad-network-file-copies
This made me curious if the Mac network share bottleneck Jeff is experiencing is common. Is this something you could easily test with yours?
On mine, the NUC11 i9 Extreme, both ports are supposed to be 40Gbps. I did try my SSD in both with nearly identical results.
https://www.asus.com/us/displays-desktops/nucs/nuc-kits/nuc-11-extreme-kit/techspec/
Sorry, meant as a reply to you Alfman.
Morgan,
Wow, I haven’t seen that form factor under the NUC brand… quite nifty and I want one
Your i9-11900kb is a tiger lake processor, which is supposed to support USB4 unlike my rocket lake i9-11900k…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Lake
I haven’t kept up with the usb/thunderbolt roadmap, it all a confusing hodgepodge, but going by the specs page for your device, it indicates thunderbolt 4 but only USB3.2 gen2…
Or maybe the cable length is a factor?
https://www.tomsguide.com/features/thunderbolt-4-vs-usb4-whats-the-difference
Either way connecting at USB3.2g2 speeds would explain why you are seeing about half the wire speed on the NUC versus the mac.
They can be had relatively inexpensively these days compared to when they were released. I got mine from B&H Photo & Video for $700 new as a barebones unit, I added an internal Crucial P5 2TB SSD and 32GB of RAM, along with a Radeon Pro W5700 I picked up new for $150 on eBay, and the other P5 SSD I bought went in the external enclosure. I love getting to play with high-end tech like that, but I also love saving money, so I buy stuff that’s a couple of generations old but still more than enough computing horsepower for my needs. I also paid half retail for the Mac Studio on Swappa for a barely used unit, no way was I going to pay $2000+ for it new from Apple!
That’s most likely the case. The enclosure is marketed as being USB 4.0 native, with backwards compatibility with slower USB standards, but it only mentions Thunderbolt 3/4 as “compatible”. I was using the included USB-C to -C cable that has “40Gbps” printed on it, and I also tried another 40Gbps cable I have (the one I use to connect the Mac to my monitor), both of which are 1/3 meter in length.
Morgan,
Yes, those were the days. After being split between that and a few other choices I decided to go with the “Enthusiast”:
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1732610-REG/intel_rnuc12snki7200u_nuc_12_mini_desktop.html
Unfortunately Intel left the market soon after. These were really capable devices at the price points.
I have seen very strange things thing happen at higher end USB / TB. Did you for example “try plugging it the other way?” Some cables and/or ports are not correctly wired and not symmetric as expected.