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M.2 enclosure recommendations for Mac Studio

The reserved amount has changed with TB4, so there is more bandwidth available to other devices.
Thanks - I hadn't seen that. I assume that enclosures would have to be TB4 as well to see the benefit? I haven't seen any external actually benchmark faster than 3GB/s, and most benchmarks with the Acasis enclosure still come in <2.8GB/s. I'm wondering what the theoretical TB4 performance would be.
 
40Gb/s (or 5GB/s) is the total bandwidth on a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 bus, but some of that is reserved for display usage, so storage is limited to ~2.8GB/s.
On every bus, even if you don't have a display connected? That's weird.
 
Seems like a 20 Gbps port speed on the Envoy Express. You never get the maximum amount of actual throughput the port supports. The 1553 MB/s speed listed is actual real-world speed. I consistently get results between 1530 MB/s and 1565 MB/s on mine in speed tests. And 15-16 Gbps on a 20 Gbps port is the most you are going to see real-world.

TB4 is fully backwards-compatible with TB3, and runs TB3 at the same speeds.

In the end, you are not going to see much of a difference between the internal SSD and a fast external SSD when it comes to actual real-world use loading samples. I've run libraries off my iMac's much faster internal SSD (not as fast as the Mac Studio's, but still a lot faster than my externals), and all of the libraries I tested load exactly the same.

Worrying about benchmarks and theoretical limits for SSD speed is just going to end up wasting money IMO for zero actual gains.
Seriously, I never pay much attention to benchmarks. More than that, it annoys me to read meaningless stupid numbers that only serve to make people think they sound intelligent when they quote them.

But in this case there's a *major* difference between the incredibly fast internal storage in the Mac Studio and external SSDs in regular USB 3 enclosures. I've become addicted to that and want to get as close to it as possible.

Also, I don't only load samples off drives, I do other things too.
 
My M1 Pro MBP has an internal 1TB SSD, and Blackmagic benches it at c. 5.5 Gbps. Is a throughput of 10Gbps to an external going to be a limiting factor for any external SSD?
Giga, Mega, bytes, bits... on Mac Studios the comparison is 5500 (internal storage) to as little as 250 (old USB C enclosures).
 
On every bus, even if you don't have a display connected? That's weird.
Yes, unfortunately. Thunderbolt has always been like this - a certain number of PCI lanes are reserved for video, but video can take more than what is reserved. On Thunderbolt 3, ~8gb/s is reserved, which would support a 2k display, though up to 4k is typically usable without negatively effecting storage on the same bus. See this article if you want more technical details. It's probably best to think of Thunderbolt 3 and 4 as a combination of different technologies (PCIe, DisplayPort, USB) that add up to ~40Gb/s in each direction, though no single bit of the whole has access to all of the bandwidth.
 
Thanks - I hadn't seen that. I assume that enclosures would have to be TB4 as well to see the benefit? I haven't seen any external actually benchmark faster than 3GB/s, and most benchmarks with the Acasis enclosure still come in <2.8GB/s. I'm wondering what the theoretical TB4 performance would be.
I only read the info on release. I have never bought a TB device even though my current and previous laptops support TB3. I don’t have the need for particularly fast external storage for my laptop.

I picked up the info here:

 
This one was the one I bought and is said to work the fastest with the Acasis, and it is fast.

WD_BLACK 2TB SN750 NVMe Internal Gaming SSD Solid State Drive - Gen3 PCIe, M.2 2280, 3D NAND, Up to 3,400 MB/s - WDS200T3X0C https://a.co/d/bLMf64z

I don’t know why that won’t show as a URL.
I have the Acacsis with the 4TB version of the Western Digital SN750 NVMe connected to my Mac Studio. Here is a speed test I just ran:

1668977635506.png
 
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I only read the info on release. I have never bought a TB device even though my current and previous laptops support TB3. I don’t have the need for particularly fast external storage for my laptop.

I picked up the info here:

Thanks - that was very informative. Looks like part of the tightening of the spec so that the TB4 really only reserves 8Gb/s for video, whereas TB3 was supposed to but actually reserves ~18Gb/s (for reasons that still aren't terribly clear to me). Also, enclosures like the OWC Envoy Express would not be able to be certified for TB4 because it only uses 2 PCIe lanes instead of the 4 that TB4 requires.
 
Seriously, I never pay much attention to benchmarks. More than that, it annoys me to read meaningless stupid numbers that only serve to make people think they sound intelligent when they quote them.

But in this case there's a *major* difference between the incredibly fast internal storage in the Mac Studio and external SSDs in regular USB 3 enclosures. I've become addicted to that and want to get as close to it as possible.

Also, I don't only load samples off drives, I do other things too.
Out of interest, have you compared the loading times for a large kontakt patch (1gb+) on the internal vs your sata3 ssd?
 
The review below shows a drive which supports both TB3 and USB 10Gbs.
Even for very heavy random reads which use less bandwidth than 10Gbs offers, in USB mode the performance difference is 113 v 422.
This probably highlights the underlying issue which is that the NVMe protocol is important to maximize random I/O on PCIe drives.
The move from SATA wasn't just at the physical transport level, but also at the higher protocol level from AHCI to NVMe.

For sequential I/O, the bottleneck isn't the lack of NVMe but the raw bandwidth.
So even with USB 40Gbs, for random I/O, it's probably not faster than USB 10Gbs.
For random I/O, the drive in the test below in USB mode tops out at 465MBs which is not much more than 5Gbs.
So if you want to get close to an internal drive with demanding workloads, you need TB3.

This begs the question as to whether USB4 encapsulates PCIe/NVMe?
Also, do Apple even use NVMe on their internal AS PCIe SSDs.
I think not.

SanDisk Pro-G40 SSD Review
 
Out of interest, have you compared the loading times for a large kontakt patch (1gb+) on the internal vs your sata3 ssd?
No, because I don't have the same libraries on both drives.

What I have noticed is that everything on the Mac is amazingly fast - and it still feels fast after having the machine almost three months. Logic launches in three seconds, Affinity Photo in two (vs. :25 on my previous machine, not that it's apples/apples).

Now, I don't have programs on external drives, but I'm still sold on having fast drives.
 
Thanks for the tip. Here are some I just found, I'll check them out later.
Can you say what the bottom line is?

Eleven minutes of someone saying what you could skim in about ten seconds is a little beyond my level of patience. :)
 
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