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Why good external SSDs are faster with Apple Silicon


Why an Intel Mac’s up to 40 Gb/s from Thunderbolt 3 is less than an Apple silicon Mac’s up to 40 Gb/s from USB4, and how you can benefit from it.

Because of protocol overheads, in practice that means a suitably fast NVMe SSD should clock read and write speeds of well over 3 GB/s, possibly even towards 4 GB/s. The better vendors will make that clear when describing their products, but when you buy a brand with an ad hoc name that you’ve not seen before, you may not realise this until you connect the SSD to your Mac. 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.

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