A few weeks ago I purchased a new Dell Thunderbolt 3 NVMe SSD drive, SD1-T0500, for my 2017 iMac with 1TB fusion drive. The idea was to have a fast(er) boot drive from this external storage unit without having to open up my iMac and install a larger internal NVMe.
The SSD is supposed to be quite speedy, 2,800MB/s read and around 1,000MBs for write, according to some tests and specs. It is based on KXG50ZNV512G NVMe TOSHIBA 512GB. I formatted the drive as APFS and did a new OS install, High Sierra 10.13.6.
Here are my first observations:
I was wondering if anyone else has this drive and what your own experience may be?
The SSD is supposed to be quite speedy, 2,800MB/s read and around 1,000MBs for write, according to some tests and specs. It is based on KXG50ZNV512G NVMe TOSHIBA 512GB. I formatted the drive as APFS and did a new OS install, High Sierra 10.13.6.
Here are my first observations:
- Blackmagic 5TB speed test reports no more than 500MBs write and about 2350MBs read. So about half as fast as advertised write speeds. I tired different stress settings in Blackmagic and all result in similar performance. Is this reduced performance possibly related to APFS?
- The drive is NOISY! It has an internal fan that comes on every few seconds and it is quite loud. One can easily hear it in a silent room. There does not seem to be any way to control the fan.
- I experienced several kernel panics, presumably caused by this drive (NVMe-related). Eventually, I turned off hard disk sleep in Energy Saver settings and that seems to have fixed the problem.
I was wondering if anyone else has this drive and what your own experience may be?
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