You pay hundreds of $$ for a high-speed Thunderbolt SSD, then connect it to a hub. Will it still deliver the same performance? Maybe not when writing.
SSD
Do fast Thunderbolt SSDs slow down when connected via a Thunderbolt hub? How fast are they when reading at the same time? Does connecting a display affect them?
Making sense of the SMART indicators for NVMe SSDs, including all recent models fitted by Apple to Macs.
The life of an SSD should be more predictable than a hard disk. All you need is its TBW, and the total amount of data written to it so far.
In extreme cases, excessive use of swap space on an internal SSD could lead to its premature death, and the end of life for that Mac. How could you assess that?
Writing to the Data volume in a VM is dismally slow. Is using shared storage any quicker? What happens when you copy a VM to an external SSD, or to another Mac?
Overall summary of a year’s testing external hard disks and SSDs ranging in cost from $50 to more than $200 per TB. Which is best?
Two reasons for paying more and using SSDs are that they’re faster and more reliable. Data on failure and reliability don’t appear as clear as the ads, though.
With the right enclosure, a Samsung 980 PRO NVMe SSD delivers transfer speeds of around 2.8 GB/s. Does that make booting from it any faster, compared with an SSD at half the speed?
It depends whether you’re going to boot macOS from it, on the space required for snapshots, and how large they could become. And there’s more.
The Eclectic Light Company 