I am happily limping along on my 2013 Mac Pro, dreaming of the day that I will retire her. Mac Studios are a pretty good option for me, as are now the M4 Minis. My main question is at what point do connected wired solid state drives connect so fast that you could very easily live with a minimal internal drive and attach more storage via TB5. Perhaps TB 4 let alone TB 5 drive access is as fast or faster than the internal drive of my current computer?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Mini Pro M4 w/ Thunderbolt 5: Is TB5 So Fast That External Drives are (nearly) As Good as Soldered Drives?
- Thread starter elasticmedia
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
My problem with external drives has never been speed. I have fast M2 SSDs which almost match the internal speeds already on my M1 Mini. The problem I have is that the internal disk gets swamped by Libraries and other user related stuff when I install software. The data files themselves live happily on external media but the progs and their libraries tend to swamp the internal disk.
As above, you need to still have a tb around for Apple's files plus free space. It takes careful space planning, understanding snapshots and using symlinks to go that way.
We also don’t know how they will perform in real life. The drives have yet to be tested by real users doing real work and we don’t know Apple's implementation/interpretation of TB5.
We also don’t know how they will perform in real life. The drives have yet to be tested by real users doing real work and we don’t know Apple's implementation/interpretation of TB5.
Rephrase your question...
The speed of external vs. internal is a statistic. It doesn't really "matter;" it just is what it is.
The question you should be asking is:
"Is having storage on external fast enough FOR MY USE CASE?"
The answer to that was "Yes" for me years ago. I've had my data (photos, etc) on external storage for years. I buy enough internal for all the libraries and so forth as @rjalex mentioned (512GB is enough in my case) and then put the rest on external storage.
Right now, that external is a 4TB NVMe in a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure - transferred over from my M1 mini. It was "Fast enough" for me on the M1, and it's still fast enough for me. Would it be "Faster" if I upgraded to a Thunderbolt 5 enclosure? Probably. But.... if it's fast enough
why spend the money?
Yes, mostly.
OWC Envoy Ultra – 6,000MB/s Thunderbolt 5 Portable SSD
Brings revolutionary speeds of over 6,000MB/s while also getting the highest speeds possible for Thunderbolt 3, Thunderbolt 4, and USB4 machines.
Which I believe — see later in this post.
Apple internal SSD implementation (via SSD speed vs size, which is close enough to Macworld’s results):
*** So is TB4/USB4.
Versus the OWC 1M2:
By the way, if you didn’t see it via the discussion links above, the base M4 SSD also does ~3000MB/s as it utilizes two NAND chips versus the four on M4 Pro.
Anyway...
I (mostly) only dump/keep temporary or otherwise non-critical files on externals — well, excluding backups. Also, IMO, keeping as much as possible on the internal (i.e., a single drive) is the easiest to manage, especially for backup/redundancy.
With that said, Apple does provide settings to move your photos, music, and video media to locations beyond your user’s folder.
I thought the larger size drives equaled higher I/O performance. So a 4TB has faster read/write than say a 1TB. Is this still true?
This point has already been reached
"minimal" is where subjectivity comes-in, and purely an individual use-case-scenario.
Personally decided on 2TB as the satisfactory space for my internals years ago.
I also (currently) enjoy a handful of 2TB externals.
The options (and various high-speed connections) available today are unparalleled.
Once I (personally) got past ~1,500 MiB/s with my externals, I just came to think of those storage spaces as sub-folders
It's about how many NAND channels you can issue read and write commands to simultaneously and the NAND chips I/O speed (Toggle version).
The base models M1/M2/M3/M4 only have two NAND channels and the higher SoCs have eight NAND channels.
Have in mind that not all storage configurations use eight NAND channels on the higher models though (only 4TB and 8TB options currently).
It's not just about speed, it's also about reliability. Many Mac owners have experienced repeated disconnection issues with external drives. That's fine for a backup that is just accessed once/night, but would be a major hassle for a drive you need to access continuosly.
I also find drive management is much simpler if I have an internal large enough to hold all my data. That way all my data is in one place, which makes managing backups of that data much simpler, since there's just one thing to back up.
I currently have 1.5 TB of data, which is comfortably stored on a 2 TB internal drive. If I had unlimited funds I'd get an 8 TB drive on my next Mac, partition 3 TB for the main drive, and put Time Machine on the remaining 5 TB. [I've not had good luck with TM on external drives; it keeps getting corrupted.] Then, like I do now, I'd use my three externals to create three sets of external backups, one of which would always be stored remotely in my safe deposit box.
I also find drive management is much simpler if I have an internal large enough to hold all my data. That way all my data is in one place, which makes managing backups of that data much simpler, since there's just one thing to back up.
I currently have 1.5 TB of data, which is comfortably stored on a 2 TB internal drive. If I had unlimited funds I'd get an 8 TB drive on my next Mac, partition 3 TB for the main drive, and put Time Machine on the remaining 5 TB. [I've not had good luck with TM on external drives; it keeps getting corrupted.] Then, like I do now, I'd use my three externals to create three sets of external backups, one of which would always be stored remotely in my safe deposit box.
I have never tried it, but, in principle, one is able to actually install macos on an external disk and boot from there [0]. Else, it is true, it can be tricky to get apps to actually use the external disk.
From my personal experience, my biggest issue has been using gog/stream from an external disk. Though I have managed to make it work, there are small inconveniences with updates, esp with apps that are supposed to startup at login, though eventually everything does work. But in general, often moving .app folders from /Applications to /Volumes/external-disk/Applications works well, and as long the most chunky files are in the .app rather than in /Library or so, it should work most of the times. The big advantage is that often you can easily use these in different systems, eg it was trivial running my games from my m-base to my m-max machine when I upgraded.
In any case, even if the speeds are not as high, even TB4 speeds are good enough for me, and there is no advantage big enough for me to pay so much money to upgrade the internal ssds vs use external disks. I would rather max out all the rest first if I had all that money, and only then upgrade the ssds.
[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/111336
All true - plus, external storage is the only modification you CAN make down the line. If you're torn between upgrading RAM and upgrading storage, pick RAM first because there's no way to change it later, at any speed.
I think as much RAM as possible, then a 2TB internal SSD is good enough. Then move all the big folders onto something very portable outside, velcroed if necessary if using a MacBook to the lid, e.g. music, photos and video footage. A 4TB NVMe stick is cheap, that's what I have. Soon 8TB will be cheap enough. So my next upgrade would be a stick of that. Well, 16TB would very comfortable indeed, but that's a couple of years down the road. Easy strategy to make the Mac purchase last as long as possible.
Meanwhile any Apple Silicon is fast enough for tasks even a few years down the road if you have enough RAM.
P.S. Of course, if work is paying for it, simply max out both RAM and SSD.
Meanwhile any Apple Silicon is fast enough for tasks even a few years down the road if you have enough RAM.
P.S. Of course, if work is paying for it, simply max out both RAM and SSD.
Have you accounted for encryption? For internal drives, the encryption/decryption is hardware-based, and the effect on speed is thus negligible. However that's not the case for external drives, so if you want to encrypt those (and I assume you would), the encryption/decryption process will slow them down noticeably.Yes, mostly.
OWC Envoy Ultra – 6,000MB/s Thunderbolt 5 Portable SSD
Brings revolutionary speeds of over 6,000MB/s while also getting the highest speeds possible for Thunderbolt 3, Thunderbolt 4, and USB4 machines.www.owc.com
Which I believe — see later in this post.
Apple internal SSD implementation (via SSD speed vs size, which is close enough to Macworld’s results):
*** So is TB4/USB4.
Versus the OWC 1M2:
By the way, if you didn’t see it via the discussion links above, the base M4 SSD also does ~3000MB/s as it utilizes two NAND chips versus the four on M4 Pro.
Anyway...
I (mostly) only dump/keep temporary or otherwise non-critical files on externals — well, excluding backups. Also, IMO, keeping as much as possible on the internal (i.e., a single drive) is the easiest to manage, especially for backup/redundancy.
With that said, Apple does provide settings to move your photos, music, and video media to locations beyond your user’s folder.
So far, I don’t have anything sensitive on external SSDs, so they are not encrypted, just standard APFS. My Time Machine HDD is encrypted APFS. Nonetheless, valid point — of which I haven’t done any testing.
Does anyone have some good data/links to share on some enclosures that have proven themselves over a period of time?
I also had this issue when trying the "tiny internal & external NVMe" route w/ an M1 Mac mini
Never had a disconnect with my Zike drive and Lexar 4TB NM790. Notice however that the included Thunderbolt/USB 4 cable is the shortest cable I've ever seen. Obviously, cable length is a factor in reliability.
I have two Acasis TBU405's--and a Maiwo K1695--connected to my M2 Studio . . . each houses a SK Hynix 2TB P31 nvme. The Acasis enclosures have proven more consistent in average (numerical) performance than the Maiwo, but all three have not been problematic in any way.
To be honest, I use a USB 3.2 C disk for my external drive, a 2 TB Samsung T7 SSD which delivers read/write speeds of about 1000 MB/s and I find that plenty fast enough for my needs. I don’t need to load files above 1 GB, and there’s next to no waiting involved at these speeds.
Going the extra mile for a Thunderbolt enclosure to get read/write speeds of 3000 MB/s or 6000 MB/s for Thunderbolt 5 seems a bit unnecessary unless you have professional requirements for those levels.
Going the extra mile for a Thunderbolt enclosure to get read/write speeds of 3000 MB/s or 6000 MB/s for Thunderbolt 5 seems a bit unnecessary unless you have professional requirements for those levels.
"it depends"
it isn't strictly the size that determines performance - it's the number of NAND chips.
larger drives tend to use more chips and smaller drives sometimes get by with one chip, as fewer chips are cheaper to manufacture and assemble.
That's not always the case though.
Are you booting off them?
That's the usage where my Hackintosh experience has shown me that you can't have even a micro hiccup or you'll get a kernel panic
Nope; they're just extra (fast) storage/usage spaces.
Nothing to do with speed for me and everything to do with laziness and lack of management. I don't want to worry about moving files about if I can avoid it. If I have chunky things I can chuck on an external HD thats great but if I was doing it a lot I would find it annoying. 1TB internal works great for me but I'm a developer and don't work with huge amounts of media. Anyone who does, I assume, will be familiar with moving lots of media files around so it doesn't make much difference to them.