While everyone else has been drooling or carping over the Apple Vision Pro, and laughing themselves silly over the bogus story of three million hacked electric toothbrushes, I’ve gone back to basics, testing out a new external SSD from one of the major manufacturers. I’m left wondering why I yet again have to write the same apologies about hardware and software shortcomings of Macs: PC users will see close to 20 Gbit/s from this iconic new product, and will be able to monitor its SMART health indicators, while Mac users won’t.

The USB 3.2 standard, with its SuperSpeedPlus ‘Gen 2×2’ mode running at 20 Gbit/s, is now over six years old and has become increasingly popular in better consumer-grade SSDs. Although getting the full 10 Gbit/s out of its predecessor USB 3.1 Gen 2 wasn’t always possible with Apple’s early M1 Macs, we’re now over three years on and even the latest M3 MacBook Pro is still stuck with the same ceiling of 10 Gbit/s for USB 3.

Testing this new drive was particularly unsatisfying. Here’s a major manufacturer offering a competitively priced range of drives from 500 GB to 4 TB that tops out at around 1 GB/s read and write, when it can achieve nearly twice that with a PC costing less than half that of the Mac. In addition, open Disk Utility in the version of macOS first released last autumn/fall, and it tells you it doesn’t support that SSD’s SMART health indicators. Not at all.

There is one potential workaround, though: if you’re prepared to run your Apple silicon Mac at reduced security, you can install the (deprecated) SAT SMART kernel extension, and that should give you access to SMART indicators for most popular SSDs. Let’s just hope that you didn’t really want the benefits of Full Security, or the stability of running your Apple silicon Mac without relying on such third-party kernel extensions.

The only faster external SSDs to enjoy Apple’s full support are Thunderbolt 3 models, which should be able to reach 3 GB/s transfer speeds, with full SMART indicators, when you can find them. The prospects of buying Thunderbolt 3 SSDs seem to have waned since the start of Covid, although their performance has improved. I’ve been putting Samsung 990 PRO NVMe modules into Orico enclosures with consistent success, but yearn for hardware of similar quality and longevity as my two ready-made OWC Envoy drives.

Late last year I found it in the promising OWC Express 1M2, and ordered an empty enclosure just before Christmas, with a 4 TB Samsung freshly prepared and waiting. The current delivery forecast for that enclosure is late March.

I get embarrassed now when trying to recommend external storage for modern Macs. Hard disks? Well, so long as you don’t actually write much to them too often, as APFS will bring them to a grinding halt if they’re used much, although you can get away with them for static storage. USB 3 SSDs? You don’t really want to use those, because of their 10 Gbit/s speed limit and lack of SMART support. Thunderbolt 3? At last they’re not quite as expensive as your Mac’s internal SSD, but you won’t have much choice, and may have to wait three or four months.

I gather that Apple does have reasons for its depressingly poor support for USB 3.x storage. Excuses over SMART health indicators don’t hold much water, though: if I take the same SATA SSDs out of their unsupported USB 3 enclosures and put them into a multi-bay Thunderbolt 3 enclosure, macOS changes its mind and provides full SMART access. Maybe the key factor here is the cost of that external enclosure?

Is it really too much of a challenge to the company that has brought us Vision Pro to provide full support for popular storage products from major manufacturers?