OWC TB5 doc and drive

[helveta]

I received my new OWC Envoy 4TB drive last week and had a chance to try it over the weekend. Using my MacBook M4 pro and the OWC thunderbolt 5 hub I did an initial time machine backup. It took 5hrs 55 minutes to back up 347GB of data. Does this about right?

 

[Bigwaff]

It took 5hrs 55 minutes to back up 347GB of data. Does this about right?

No, that is ludicrously slow. 350GB of data is not that much for TB 3, let alone 4/5. Check System Information app and verify your drive is connected using TB. I'm guessing it is in USB 3 compatibility mode.

 

[helveta]

The Hub and drive show up under the Thunderbolt/USB4 bus 2. Port speed shows 80Gb/s. How do I fix this?

 

[Bigwaff]

I received my new OWC Envoy 4TB drive last week

Which OWC Envoy did you purchase? Envoy Ultra? Envoy Pro FX? Envoy Express? Plain old Envoy?

 

[turbineseaplane]

Are you using the cable that came with it?

That is "nonsense level" of dog dog slow for that drive

 

[PaulD-UK]

Are you including a Spotlight indexing process of the TM drive in your timing?
Is this a new Mac with Spotlight indexing the whole file system at the same time as Time Machine is running the first backup?

 

[helveta]

I'm using a 2024 MacBook M4 Pro with 24GB ram, with the new OWC Thunderbolt 5 hub and a new OWC Envoy Ultra Thunderbolt 5 4TB portable SSD and the attached cable plugged into the hub. The MacBook is from November and I did a migration from my old MacBook Air at that time so I assume spotlight indexing had already been done.

But this got me questioning whether the cable from the laptop to the hub is TB5. I'll have to wait until I get home to check.

 

[helveta]

Well, it is a TB5 cable, so that's not the problem.

 

[Bigwaff]

If it were me, I’d reformat and run Black Magic disk speed tests. You might have a dud.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Did you try connecting the Envoy directly to the MacBook Pro…with nothing else connected?

 

[OWC_TAL]

Also try updating your Mac to OS 15.3

 

[helveta]

Well, I tested the drive both plugged into the hub and directly plugged into the MacBook. I reformatted the drive. Through it all I consistently would get write speeds on Black Magic of over 5000 MB/s to start and after a minute or two they would go down to around 1700 MB/s and then cycle through those two ranges. I contacted OPC support and they said that the backup was slow because Time Machine is slow and it isn't a valid benchmark and that the Black Magic speed test uses compressed data so it is susceptible to things like Spotlight Indexing and Time Machine checking the drive and things like that.

 

[Bigwaff]

I contacted OPC support and they said that the backup was slow because Time Machine is slow and it isn't a valid benchmark and that the Black Magic speed test uses compressed data so it is susceptible to things like Spotlight Indexing and Time Machine checking the drive and things like that.

While TM can be slow, it’s not that slow, especially for initial backup. TM won’t check the drive while it’s doing a backup and won’t check the drive if it’s not a TM drive, which it can’t be if you are running Black Magic tests against it. TM drives are only writable by TM. As for Spotlight, if the drive has no files, as a recently formatted drive will have, there is nothing for Spotlight to index.

 

[OWC_TAL]

Speed going down initial is normal. That is the SLC cache filling up. There is a bullet about that somewhere on the listing page. The exact same actually holds true for LaCie's TB5 SSD as well.

 

[helveta]

Speed going down initial is normal. That is the SLC cache filling up. There is a bullet about that somewhere on the listing page. The exact same actually holds true for LaCie's TB5 SSD as well.

I understand that. What surprised me was the speed fluctuating in a cycle through the whole backup.