Check its protocol support and expected maximum transfer rate, then whether it supports SMART indicators and Trims with APFS. Finally check its real-world performance.
performance
How power efficiency is just as important to desktop Macs as it is to notebooks, and the story of the Mac mini in power from 2005-2023.
Given that Thunderbolt SSDs are unusual and expensive, should you buy a USB4 model that claims to be compatible with Thunderbolt? Watch out for the traps.
A gentle introduction to the new architecture, from how macOS allocates threads to core types, overflow, variable frequency, ending in huge differences in power.
Virtualisation of macOS on Apple silicon does deliver performance that’s impressively close to that of the host. Here are the figures to demonstrate it.
In a wide range of in-core tests, CPU performance in VMs is close to that of code running native on the host, and M3 VMs are faster than M1 native. With one significant exception.
How have the CPUs in our Macs become faster since the Macintosh 128K was launched by Steve Jobs forty years ago?
M3 chips widen the gap between Pro and Max variants. They also change relative performance between P and E cores to make M3 CPUs more versatile.
The M1 cycle took 16 months from basic to Ultra; that shortened to 12 months for the M2. As the first Studio M2 Ultras were being prepared for shipping, the M3 cycle started.
A strange observation, that the last thread to complete a matrix multiplication task was always much later than others, explored to discover a different strategy used by macOS.
The Eclectic Light Company 