handheldgames
macrumors 68000
4k write performance is abysmal on Apple Silicon. Almost a 90% decrease vs intel!!
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.
Thunderbolt 3 M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosures
- Thread starter oreggero
- WikiPost WikiPost
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
- Status
4k write performance is abysmal on Apple Silicon. Almost a 90% decrease vs intel!!
It looks like Apple Silicon based systems aren't triggering the SLC write cache.
What's weird is that it happens on external SSDs (with their own controller), as well as on the internal drive (with the controller embedded in the Apple Silicon SOC).
If you look at this thread this behaviour is consistent across all Macs : intel proc -> SLC write cache used, Apple silicon -> SLC write cache not used.
What's weird is that it happens on external SSDs (with their own controller), as well as on the internal drive (with the controller embedded in the Apple Silicon SOC).
If you look at this thread this behaviour is consistent across all Macs : intel proc -> SLC write cache used, Apple silicon -> SLC write cache not used.
Hi guys great thread.. After buying the Acasis tbu405, I came to this thread to find out the best ssd for it.
I read all the 35 pages. At first I thought WD sn750 would be great for me. Than I read that the latest batches had cut down the write speeds. Than I thought 980 Pro will be great... But now I read the Trim issues mentioned few pages ago.
I will need your help.
- I have a base Mac Mini M1(16gb ram).
- I have TB enclosure Acasis TBU405
I want this drive to be my main drive other than the system files on the Apple ssd. I am editing 4K videos mainly on Davinci or Premiere. So I want the drive to be as fast as possible but it better be reliable.
Which SSD would you guys advice me to get? I prefer 2TB but if you say 1TB options are faster and reliable, I am OK with that too.
I really need your help... especially with the base Mac mini M1.
Cheers..
Tyler
I read all the 35 pages. At first I thought WD sn750 would be great for me. Than I read that the latest batches had cut down the write speeds. Than I thought 980 Pro will be great... But now I read the Trim issues mentioned few pages ago.
I will need your help.
- I have a base Mac Mini M1(16gb ram).
- I have TB enclosure Acasis TBU405
I want this drive to be my main drive other than the system files on the Apple ssd. I am editing 4K videos mainly on Davinci or Premiere. So I want the drive to be as fast as possible but it better be reliable.
Which SSD would you guys advice me to get? I prefer 2TB but if you say 1TB options are faster and reliable, I am OK with that too.
I really need your help... especially with the base Mac mini M1.
Cheers..
Tyler
My choices in order based on current prices
1. Solidigm P44 Pro. 2TB Amazon $150. Step up from P41. Faster than 850x. I personally have not used this and the enclosure will be the llimiting factor. Reason to get is that it future proofs your purchase.
2. If you dont want to pay that much, get hte Hynix P31 2TB, Amazon $120. I have thi in a Acasis case and runs really well and reliable and cool. It probably wont be any slower than the P44 Pro. Later, if you want, you can buy anohter one and raid0 the 2 together. That is what I am doing. 6500 MBps sequestial R/W speed.
Thanks whodiini for the input.
Did you manage to test these with mac mini m1? Hynix P31 sounds like a deal. I am not a great tech guy so I have no idea about doing a raid0. Can I do it easily with mac mini m1 silicon?
orpheus1120
macrumors 65816
I found a great deal here in my local dealer for a never used unboxed sn750 2TB for 100usd. I know 2TB version is probably not as good as the 1TB one in terms of write speeds but I really don't want to go with a 1TB disk. I paid almost 130 for the TB3 enclosure.. and I feel like it should at least be 2TB to be worth the price. Anyway.. this is a great board and i will happily share my benchmarks on a base mac m1 after receiving the ssd this week. I guess APFS is the format to go.. will try both encrypted and non encrypted.. thanks again for the great discussion over 35 pages
In general 2TB SSDs are faster than 1TB models. And yes, APFS is the format to go.
Ideally, 2 of the same enclosures with the same drive inside. Main issue with the M1 is that it only has 2 thunderbolt ports, so you will use both. Each drive will use almost all the data bandwidth (32Gbps) of each TB port. Then use disk utility to set up your raid. I tested it with a M1 Studio max. It is hard to test with my M1 because I need to use one of the TB ports to access the computer.
Any thoughts on the best 4TB version? I’m mostly looking for reliability and have heard the 4TB models overheat. Curious it it makes more sense to just go SSD instead of NVME. I like the idea of the faster NVME TB3 option, but need 4TB and don’t want to sacrifice reliability. I’m not so interested in RAID 0 as the trade off for the additional speed doesn’t seem worth it for the additional reliability risk.
I was also looking for 4TB storage for mainly music and movies, not as on OS drive and was debating on a SATA drive like MX500 or a Crucial P3. It really depends on your use need. There are not many 4TB NVMe around. The Crucial P3 has now dropped to $220. QLC dramless. Crucial is a pretty reliable name. Main downside to this drive is after the pcache is used (~ 1/4 free space), it reverts to native QLC speed, which for this drive is slow - 100Mbps. This is even slower than the MX500 which uses TLC. Runs cool. So if you dont need to write more than 1/4 free space sequentially, then you are OK AS LONG as you are not using it as an OS drive. The random speeds are poor. Otherwise the only ohter 4TB NVMe name brand I can find is the WD SN 850X for $380. I also looked at the Team Group 4TB MP34, but I wasnt sure of its reliabillity so I passed. It has TLC and DRAM.
Hmm.. That sounds OK to me. I mean I don't need the second TB port. My workspace is fine with one monitor(HDMI) and I also have an USB hub for card reader/mouse etc. Now the problem is... to find another 2TB sn750 for sale 🙂
If I do it like you told, will i get higher speeds on each drive? x2 speed for each right? That sounds too good to be true and I really have no experience with raid thing 🙂
Since I really don't know anything about RAID, does it effect the reliability? I mean if I go for RAID with 2x2TB tb3 enclosures, I tought if one disk somehow fails the other one would be enought to recover data. Or maybe the opposite.. if one fails both is gone???
For a RAID0 configuration this is correct, if one drive fails, the entire RAID0 set is corrupt and you loose the data on the other drives as well.
Ahhh.. not the kind of situation I would ever want. So no need for chasing the extra speed benefits.
So here is the results as I have promised. I guess might help people with Mac Mini m1 setups.
- Mac Mini m1 256gb 16gb ram
- MacOS Ventura 13.1
- Acasis TBU405 Thunderbolt enclosure, connected via the supplied cable directly to M1 TB port.
- WD_black sn750 2TB NvMe SSD
- Disk is formatted as APFS(not encrypted)
I was expecting a lower write speed after reading about the past comments here on the topic regarding 2TB sn750 underperforming 1TB ones. But it is not the case for me. Maybe MacOS Ventura solved that maybe APFS format.
But I am super happy now.
P.S. I tried the same test with APFS encrypted format too. Results were around %15 lower. I had also guessed it to be like that since the encryption might cut down the speed. So no encryption is the way to go.
- Mac Mini m1 256gb 16gb ram
- MacOS Ventura 13.1
- Acasis TBU405 Thunderbolt enclosure, connected via the supplied cable directly to M1 TB port.
- WD_black sn750 2TB NvMe SSD
- Disk is formatted as APFS(not encrypted)
I was expecting a lower write speed after reading about the past comments here on the topic regarding 2TB sn750 underperforming 1TB ones. But it is not the case for me. Maybe MacOS Ventura solved that maybe APFS format.
But I am super happy now.
P.S. I tried the same test with APFS encrypted format too. Results were around %15 lower. I had also guessed it to be like that since the encryption might cut down the speed. So no encryption is the way to go.
Now my plan is to keep the OS in mac ssd but use the external one as my video editing/storing/cache vs for editing apps. I am still somewhat not sure to move the OS to external case. Internal drive is still just a little faster on read speeds and i believe M1 memory swap will benefit from that. What is your opinion about time machine? Should I partition that 2TB as 500+1500 and run the time machine on the 500 part? Any benefits? Since all my files will be on external ssd, I don't think timemachine will backup those and so maybe no point for a time machine setup as of now.
The advantage of APFS is that the partition is dynamic. Partition drive as APFS and have 2 partitions, they will share the entire 2GB.
May i know why we are recommending SN750 instead of SN770? This taken from acasis china official store. In fact they recommend SN770 instead, as new batch of SN750 seems maximum write in speed around 1gbps only.
No body is recommending SN750 over 770. It was the old forum posts before 770. However I managed to find a good deal on an older SN750 and grabbed it. Also at those posts people claimed that 2TB sn750 was slower too.. But not in my case. There are too many parameters that effects the final speed and I guess there are a lot of corrupt information already spread in the internet(even from the manufacturers themselves). Someone may buy the fastest enclosure/drive but format the disk at ExFat resulting poor performance..and than claim that it's not working.. Or use a bad cable.. Or use an old OS.. That's why I tried to include all the parameters in my test results above..
orpheus1120
macrumors 65816
Where did you see SN750 recommended over SN770 in this thread?
The Acasis data on the TBU405 are not up to date as it was testing M1 Macs only. It also stopped its test on the SN850 and not the SN850X.
I would assume that if a combination of drive and enclosure is listed here and reported working fine then it should work fine for you too. Users can test a wider range of combo than any enclosure manufacture could because it's simply too exhaustive for them to test the greatest and latest against their enclosures constantly.
The Acasis data on the TBU405 are not up to date as it was testing M1 Macs only. It also stopped its test on the SN850 and not the SN850X.
I would assume that if a combination of drive and enclosure is listed here and reported working fine then it should work fine for you too. Users can test a wider range of combo than any enclosure manufacture could because it's simply too exhaustive for them to test the greatest and latest against their enclosures constantly.
I thought I would try a 4TB Samsung T7 shield, external SSD. I understand they are very reliable, and while are not TB, should get about 800 MB/s speeds, which I figured would be a good compromise for my needs. At $300, it seemed like an economical solution vs. a 4TB NVME stick like the SN770 in an Acacis TB enclosure.
I received the drive and was surprised to see that the Read speeds were only about 300 MB/s (measures with both BlackMagic and Aja Speedtest). The write speed was as I expected, about 800 MB/s. Is this normal, or did I get a bad drive?
It's connected to a maxed out M2 MBA and I tried different ports, used a TB4 cable, reformatted it as APFS, etc.. Any thoughts on why it is so slow? It's even slower than a 2TB T7 touch I had tried out. I thought the T7 Shield was the fastest USB SSD Samsung made and was improved over the standard T7 and T7 touch.
I received the drive and was surprised to see that the Read speeds were only about 300 MB/s (measures with both BlackMagic and Aja Speedtest). The write speed was as I expected, about 800 MB/s. Is this normal, or did I get a bad drive?
It's connected to a maxed out M2 MBA and I tried different ports, used a TB4 cable, reformatted it as APFS, etc.. Any thoughts on why it is so slow? It's even slower than a 2TB T7 touch I had tried out. I thought the T7 Shield was the fastest USB SSD Samsung made and was improved over the standard T7 and T7 touch.
Thanks. I just tried that and all it did was slow down the write speed a bit but did nothing for the read speed. Still reading at only 340 MB/s.