USB4 on M3 MacBook and new Orico Crystal M.2 SSD enclosure

[ubercool]

I have been posting frequently on the USB on M1 Macs isn’t actually 10Gb/s? thread since owning a 2020 M1 MacBook Pro, but now that I use that Mac only for testing and also own a 2023 M3 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB memory, I thought I would put my new Orico enclosure, which I purchased via Kickstarter, through its paces.

For comparison purposes, I also include Black Magic benchmarks between 2020 M1 (16GB) and its 2TB SSD, and 2023 M3 Max (64GB) and its 4TB SSD. Those tests reveal a more than doubling of internal SSD access speed, a remarkable improvement.

MBP 2020 M1:

MBP 2023 M3 Max:

The Black Magic tests of the Orico Crystal M.2 SSD Enclosure equipped with a Samsung 990 PRO 4TB, shows a negligible improvement between the 2020 M1 MBP and the 2023 M3 Max and the Orico enclosure, with minor differences in their 3,000+ MB/s write and read speeds.

MBP 2020 M1:

MBP 2023 M3 Max:

I was able to copy 797GB of data to the Orico/Samsung external in about 17 minutes using an ice pack to keep the drive cool. While the Orico has an internal fan that runs pretty quiet, I use ice packs to maximize throughput. 🥶

Pics below show the Orico drive with its see-through enclosure and the bare, and heat-sinked and installed Samsung PRO 990 SSD. Let me know if I missed something. 😊

 

[ubercool]

I also conducted AJA and AmorphousDiskMark tests of the 2020 MBP M1 and the Orico/Samsung enclosure, which produced entirely different results due to methodology used.

 

[MacCheetah3]

Nice work.

Your results match up with my tests on OWC’s USB4 enclosure, which is marketed as “up to 3151MB/s real-world performance":

About 3 to 3.5 GBps seems fair considering protocol overhead, possible interference, general drive and transmission error corrections, etc.

 

[MrGimper]

Sorry to jump in but it may be of interest. The above is my experience of a Hynix Gold P31 2TB NVMe inside a ugreen 40Gb/s enclosure, on my 16" M3 Max:

UGREEN M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure, 40Gbps NVMe