It’s possible this is simply a bug in the M1 firmware, but if so, it’s been around far too long.
Thunderbolt external drives for mac full#
Since its release in November 2020, Apple has not released an M1 Mac with Thunderbolt ports that actually live up to their full potential.Oakley goes into much more technical detail in his report, but several key facts emerge. Oakley achieved speeds less than 10% of what the performance should have been. If you use a Thunderbolt 4 cable to connect to the USB-C port on the front of the Mac Studio, matters get even worse. In fact, Oakley found that the fastest storage devices perform at about half their expect speeds on the M1 series, no matter which one you look at. While the Intel Macs performed as expected, the M1 Mac Thunderbolt ports didn’t even come close. He did real-life testing, measuring throughput using his own app to write 160 files sized from 2MB to 2GB to the external SSD. On an Intel Mac, all drives and cables reported SuperSpeed+ 10Gbps connections in macOS System Information.
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Thunderbolt external drives for mac pro#
The testing also included a 2021 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro SoC, 32GB memory and 2TB internal SSD.įor his testing, Oakley connected a variety of external SSD devices using certified Thunderbolt 4 cables as well as USB-C data cables. Oakley tested an Apple Mac Studio, with an M1 Max, 32GB of RAM and 2TB internal SSD, connected to an Apple Studio Display.
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Howard Oakley, of Eclectic Light, put two M1 Macs to the test after multiple reports of lower-than-expected data transfer speeds. M1 Mac Thunderbolt Ports Significantly Underperform In 2022, the Cupertino-based company shipped the Mac Studio, also offering Thunderbolt 4 ports along with a pair of USB-C ports we thought would fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2. 2020 at that year’s Consumer Electronics Show, releasing the final specification in July 2020.Īpple released its newest 16-inch MacBook Pro, claiming support for Thunderbolt 4, in 2021. Thunderbolt 4, on the other hand, should offer data bandwidth up to 40Gbps. In theory, that offers data rates up to 20Gbps.
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2017 and introduced a SuperSpeed+ data transfer mode. An even more recent standard, USB 3.2, came out in Sept.