External 40Gbps USB-4 / Thunderbolt drive for my Mac

[BDennis]

I don't know if this will be of any interest to anyone here. I found my Mac internal 1Tb drive can fill up very quickly with photos especially with bird / wildlife photography (I have 1000s of photos to sort out after a trip, it takes a while).

I've been using 500Gb and 1Tb SSD drives in Sabrent USB-3 enclosures connecting externally. I have a whole bunch of these but they're "up to 5Gbps" speed and practically it depends on the SSDs - the good ones will do 300Mbps transfers which is OK. Sometimes I connect the SSDs and they only get about 20Mbps which is really slow - it is the cheaper Crucial BX-500 SSDs that often do this, the Samsung ones are better (EVO 860).

I've been looking for some Thunderbolt external drive enclosures for the Mac. They're quite expensive as I think Intel bump up the chipset licensing costs. I decided to dip my toe in the water and got on of these ACASIS enclosures with a 1Tb NVME SSD "chip":

"ACASIS 40Gbps M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure,PCIe to USB-C External Hard Drive Enclosure,Support Size 2280 M&B+M-Key,Compatible with Thunderbolt 3/4,USB4/3.2/3.1/3.0,Type-C Aluminum SSD Case Up to 2700MB/s"

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BL6F56DP

This has cost a bit but I wanted to try it out. It is up to 40Gbps transfers over Thunderbolt or USB-4 (pretty much the same interface). There may be similar products that are cheaper but reviews of this one were good. A couple of photos:




This is the speed test result:


The Mac shows it connects in Thunderbolt mode, which is always worth checking especially if a drive is slow for unknown reasons


I'm pretty happy with this so far and will probably get a larger NVMe SSD at some point and maybe another enclosure - but these SSDs are easy to swap out with care. I could perhaps get a USB-3 NVME Enclosure.

It seems worth the cost as upgrading the Mac HDD at time of purchase is so costly in comparison. I will use this for my "in work" photos and CaptureOne Libraries. Also for video editing if I do more of that.

Bill

[rustyarrow]

I think for £100 not a bad buy, need to think about what I may do, use windows a lot for work and I think the next super PC will be windows again, the imac I am on if fine but dont think I will get another one.

[BDennis]

Yes they’ve come down in price. I like the iMacs but you end up with a decent display hard wired to an old processor. They used to have the ability to use them in target display mode with another Mac but stop supporting that in the latest iMacs. I’ve got an old one that does that. I’ve now gone the route of getting a Mac Mini for the desktop and a M2 Pro MacBook Pro for the mobile option. The 2018 Intel Mini I have is a bit slow now though.

[rustyarrow]

This is not too bad, just does not fit in with the others so well , 2019 I think. 40gb memory helps it

[Ian]

I'm not sure about Macs, but with PCs the bus connection can often be the bottleneck these days. Both my laptop and desktop PCs have PCIe Level 3 x4 support for their internal M.2 NVME drive slots, which has a maximum speed of 4GB/sec (bytes, not bits). That would double with PCIe Level 4. The one of the drives I have installed is slightly faster than PCIe3 x4 (5GB/s write/6.6GB/s read), so a motherboard with PCIe4 would give me an edge over what I have, but it would have cost a lot more, as would drives that are significantly faster to take best advantage of PCIe4. I don't have the latest and greatest USB ports, just USB 3.1 Gen 1 and Gen 2 (Type A) so 5 or 10 gigabits, though the latter out-performs SATA III (6 gigabits). Even at 10Gb/s, USB 3.1 Gen 2 is a quarter of the speed potential of Thunderbolt 4 and would definitely be a bottleneck to most decent M.2 NVME drives. But with Lightroom, accessing the RAW files from external USB 3 drives, I don't notice a major penalty in performance - maybe I'm just used to it. The need for speed is the previews, which are held on the fastest internal drive.

Ian

[BDennis]

I'm not sure about Macs, but with PCs the bus connection can often be the bottleneck these days. Both my laptop and desktop PCs have PCIe Level 3 x4 support for their internal M.2 NVME drive slots, which has a maximum speed of 4GB/sec (bytes, not bits). That would double with PCIe Level 4. The one of the drives I have installed is slightly faster than PCIe3 x4 (5GB/s write/6.6GB/s read), so a motherboard with PCIe4 would give me an edge over what I have, but it would have cost a lot more, as would drives that are significantly faster to take best advantage of PCIe4. I don't have the latest and greatest USB ports, just USB 3.1 Gen 1 and Gen 2 (Type A) so 5 or 10 gigabits, though the latter out-performs SATA III (6 gigabits). Even at 10Gb/s, USB 3.1 Gen 2 is a quarter of the speed potential of Thunderbolt 4 and would definitely be a bottleneck to most decent M.2 NVME drives. But with Lightroom, accessing the RAW files from external USB 3 drives, I don't notice a major penalty in performance - maybe I'm just used to it. The need for speed is the previews, which are held on the fastest internal drive.

Ian

I'm out of touch with the latest PC motherboard architectures now for storage etc. So are the motherboard M.2 NVME drives all on the same bus?

With a MacPro tower or rack system you have PCIe4 slots inside where you can add storage cards - probably really expensive!

With the MacBook Pro 14 M2 laptop I'm limited to the 3 x Thunderbolt / USB-4 ports but it looks like each of them has their own bus so maybe no bottleneck unless the processor is one. I haven't got enough Thunderbolt storage devices to test this though!


I think it will be enough for my needs. I really don't have enough devices to use the available data ports to capacity. Usually I have a mini USB-C hub plugged into one port for external mouse + keyboard and a USB-C drive. Then I've got 2 ports spare for other USB drives or this new fast SSD enclosure. The only trouble with a laptop is the number of cables you need to plug / unplug to use it in a desk setup with multiple storage devices etc. I could dock it via a single thunderbolt port using a dock/hub unit but then it's all on one data bus.

Bill

[wornish]

Thanks for sharing. That is fast!
Just tested the speed of my external SSD which only connects with USB-C even when plugged into a Thunderbolt port on my Mac.
It averages about 775KB/s read and write using the Blackmagic speed test app.

The slowest part in the storage chain is still the SD Card in your camera though, no fix for that

[wornish]

Typo above it should be MB/s not KB/S

[BDennis]

Thanks for sharing. That is fast!
Just tested the speed of my external SSD which only connects with USB-C even when plugged into a Thunderbolt port on my Mac.
It averages about 775KB/s read and write using the Blackmagic speed test app.

The slowest part in the storage chain is still the SD Card in your camera though, no fix for that

775KBS/S seems slows for an SSD? I wonder why.

This is what my SSD in a USB enclosure gets with the speed test



This is connected via a hub, I check the connection speed in the Mac system report:


I've found the speed of these SSDs can vary and sometimes I have to "re-plug" them to get a better speed or I just leave them connected for a while. I think if I haven't used them for some time there's some internal maintenance going on inside the drive. I think SSDs are not a great plan for long-term archival as they need powering up every so often so I have some spinning plate drives for that. I connected one the other day not used for a while and it took ages to come online but the enclosure LED was flashing all the time during that period.

Bill

[wornish]

It was a typo sorry. It should be MB/s, not KBs. That's wet string speed.

[Ian]

I'm out of touch with the latest PC motherboard architectures now for storage etc. So are the motherboard M.2 NVME drives all on the same bus?

With a MacPro tower or rack system you have PCIe4 slots inside where you can add storage cards - probably really expensive!

With the MacBook Pro 14 M2 laptop I'm limited to the 3 x Thunderbolt / USB-4 ports but it looks like each of them has their own bus so maybe no bottleneck unless the processor is one. I haven't got enough Thunderbolt storage devices to test this though!


I think it will be enough for my needs. I really don't have enough devices to use the available data ports to capacity. Usually I have a mini USB-C hub plugged into one port for external mouse + keyboard and a USB-C drive. Then I've got 2 ports spare for other USB drives or this new fast SSD enclosure. The only trouble with a laptop is the number of cables you need to plug / unplug to use it in a desk setup with multiple storage devices etc. I could dock it via a single thunderbolt port using a dock/hub unit but then it's all on one data bus.

Bill

As I understand it, a companion chipset to the CPU manages the bus allocation, among other things. I'm sure it's very similar to a Mac as both PCs and Macs now use industry standard architectures with that regard. Apple most likely designs its own chipset. My PC board is an Asus Prime B450M-A, which is an affordable but good spec. mid-tier product, launched 6 years ago. It uses the AMD B450 chipset designed for AMD Socket AM4 compatible CPUs. I couldn't really justify all the bangs and whistles of a higher-spec. motherboard at the time, and it still works really well now - at least for my needs. The CPU (AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-core 12-threads), 32GB RAM, and motherboard, pre-built, so I just needed to install it in my case and connect the peripherals, etc., cost £381, inc. shipping. At the time I used an existing 500GB SATA III SSD as the main drive.

Ian

[BDennis]

So this is kind of weird. The supplied Thunderbolt 4 cable for this device only works if I connect a specific end of it to the enclosure and the other end to the Mac. If I reverse the cable ends, it doesn't work!

The cable is symmetric with the same markings on each end (number 4 and a lightning symbol). This doesn't seem right to me. It's a sad way to spend a Friday night trying every combination of a Thunderbolt cable as you can flip over each end as well! It doesn't make any difference if I flip the connector over I just have to have the right end of the cable plugged into the device, I wonder if their cable is not a fully TB4 compliant one.

When this first happened I thought the device had failed and tried it with the OM-1 USB-C cable and it connected so hopefully not a problem with the enclosure.

I think I'll buy another TB4 cable.

Bill