Which of the external disks tested can be used to boot from? Do they work reliably with Secure Boot? Could you boot from an external hard disk?
SSD
Armed with just a couple of flashy Thunderbolt NVMe SSDs and his home-made benchmarking app, we discover whether Thunderbolt is any better than USB 3.x.
During the first 11.6 seconds of writing, speed was steady at 2 GB/s, then suddenly dropped to 0.7 GB/s. That’s thermal throttling for you.
On T2 and M1 Macs, FileVault provides robust protection of the Data volume on internal storage without any performance penalty.
Before deciding on internal and external storage, you need to be realistic about the performance it will achieve. Here are the numbers – and a couple of things we tend to forget about.
Internal or external? Hard disk or SSD? USB or Thunderbolt? Cooled or compact? Branded or separates? An external boot disk? Do you have a return and refund option?
It’s limited to 5 Gb/s, giving read rates of about 400 MB/s and writes at about 430 MB/s. Fine for Time Machine backups, but bad with NVMe drives.
M1 Macs don’t support SMART monitoring over USB-C, forcing us to choose between Full Security without SMART, or Reduced Security with SMART support.
Signs of an SSD going down may be confusing, but when random apps seem to freeze, be suspicious. Diagnosis and recovery are also covered.
With no possibility of memory expansion, and no upgrading of internal storage, you need to specify your M1 Mac correctly. Here’s how.
