I am fortunate enough to own both a MacBook Air M1 and a 'late' 2018 Intel Core i3 Mac Mini, both with 256GB internal storage.
For a number of reasons I have recently become interested in buying external storage, that I can 1/ easily swap between the above 2 Mac computers and 2/ work from directly. I set interface speed vs price as my go-to criteria. Ordinarily I would follow the herd (i.e. YouTube 'sin-fluencers'), in which case a Samsung T7 would be near the top of the pile. Until I discovered the T7 needs 'UASP' and macOS 12 does not have the 'right' IOUSB extension for that (on either the M1 or Intel machine).
(Queue lots of online moaning by users not getting the speeds they expected.)
But Apple's USB-C/TB ports support faster speeds that that, right? Apparently not. 3/ Apple has some sort of clock/sensor in the USB-C ports - either the client device talks TB3 (let's ignore USB4 for now) so gets full bandwidth, or not, in which case it get's the best USB3 can provide (5Gbps max on the Mini, and maybe 10Gbps on the M1).
As NVME/3.2x2 devices like the Caldigit Tuff Nano/Sandisk Extreme Pro V2 seem unlikely to achieve their potential across both devices (both have different USB specs), and with the LaCie Rugged 1TB Thunderbolt 3 drive coming in at a whopping £400, I'm left with WD's Sandisk Extreme Portable SSD V2/My Passport SSD range, and 5Gbps speeds. (WD's drives do have the advantage(?) of hardware-based encryption.)
As the task I want to perform is bulk de-duping (i.e. largely reading/deleting with very little writing) and I can get 5Gbps from any SATAlll-based Crucial [B|M]X500 in mini-USB3 enclosure anyway (and without all the heat-throttling faffing-about) am I right to stick with boggy-5Gbps, accepting that, without UASP, there's no upgrade path so nothing new to buy at all?
Footnote; whilst the M1's battery works fine for the M1 SOC, it takes a big hit dealing with one (or more) mechanical/HDD drives. This makes current-draw a consideration, limiting scope to low current SSDs - as none of the manufacturers declare bus-power requirements for their devices, probably NVME SSDs (like the Caldigit Tuff Nano/Sandisk Extreme Pro V2?).
Thanks in advance for thoughts and comments on this 'gibberish'.
For a number of reasons I have recently become interested in buying external storage, that I can 1/ easily swap between the above 2 Mac computers and 2/ work from directly. I set interface speed vs price as my go-to criteria. Ordinarily I would follow the herd (i.e. YouTube 'sin-fluencers'), in which case a Samsung T7 would be near the top of the pile. Until I discovered the T7 needs 'UASP' and macOS 12 does not have the 'right' IOUSB extension for that (on either the M1 or Intel machine).
(Queue lots of online moaning by users not getting the speeds they expected.)
But Apple's USB-C/TB ports support faster speeds that that, right? Apparently not. 3/ Apple has some sort of clock/sensor in the USB-C ports - either the client device talks TB3 (let's ignore USB4 for now) so gets full bandwidth, or not, in which case it get's the best USB3 can provide (5Gbps max on the Mini, and maybe 10Gbps on the M1).
As NVME/3.2x2 devices like the Caldigit Tuff Nano/Sandisk Extreme Pro V2 seem unlikely to achieve their potential across both devices (both have different USB specs), and with the LaCie Rugged 1TB Thunderbolt 3 drive coming in at a whopping £400, I'm left with WD's Sandisk Extreme Portable SSD V2/My Passport SSD range, and 5Gbps speeds. (WD's drives do have the advantage(?) of hardware-based encryption.)
As the task I want to perform is bulk de-duping (i.e. largely reading/deleting with very little writing) and I can get 5Gbps from any SATAlll-based Crucial [B|M]X500 in mini-USB3 enclosure anyway (and without all the heat-throttling faffing-about) am I right to stick with boggy-5Gbps, accepting that, without UASP, there's no upgrade path so nothing new to buy at all?
Footnote; whilst the M1's battery works fine for the M1 SOC, it takes a big hit dealing with one (or more) mechanical/HDD drives. This makes current-draw a consideration, limiting scope to low current SSDs - as none of the manufacturers declare bus-power requirements for their devices, probably NVME SSDs (like the Caldigit Tuff Nano/Sandisk Extreme Pro V2?).
Thanks in advance for thoughts and comments on this 'gibberish'.
