Just got a Mac Mini M1 and already had a T7. Using Black Magic I only get about 600 Read/Write using the USB C to USB C cable. Is there anything we can do go get the full speed from the T7?
Is 600MB/sec enough to edit 4K off the drive?
That sounds a little on the low side for a T7 with the M1 Mini (I have both of these), and IIRC I get in the high 600MB/s range - I'd need to check again to be sure. Unfortunately I don't think there is anything you can do to improve it assuming you have good quality cables, although I did find that I got somewhat better speeds by going through my CalDigit TS3+ dock, which is connected to the Mac via Thunderbolt. I think it was about 60-80MB/s faster.
600MB/s should be fine for editing 4K video from the drives - I do this often and have never seen dropped frames due to disk speed. If you look at the Activity Monitor disk activity, or if you have an SSD monitoring tool like the one in iStatMenus, you can see the read/write speeds, and you'll probably find that they are well within this limit. Bear in mind that a lot of 4K video codecs are only using about 100-200 mega *bits* per second, or 25MB/s. Even with multiple streams of video most SSDs are capable of reading this for at least a short period.
One caveat is that most SSD manufacturers quote an ideal maximum throughput using a limited high-speed cache to get those high numbers. I think this is about 40GB on a 1TB Samsung T7. This means that for sustained transfers the speed will drop-off dramatically once the cached is used. This is why Black Magic Design doesn't approve the T7 for use with their cameras (but does approve the T5, which although slower, has a more consistent long-term write speed). That said, while this is critical for video capture (at least for long takes), it may not be such an issue for video editing if you are working on clips in a normal workflow.
