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Stibium

Do Thunderbolt hubs impair performance?

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?

January 26, 2023 Macs, Technology

Virtualisation on Apple silicon Macs: 1 How well does it work?

T T Read More

Lightweight virtualisation has come to Apple silicon Macs. How well does it work, though? Are there any significant limitations?

July 4, 2022 Macs, Technology

How hard disks get slower as they fill up

File data stored towards the periphery of the disk is read and written nearly twice as fast as that near the centre. How to take advantage of this.

May 17, 2022 Macs, Technology

Interpreting and using disk performance data

What’s our purpose? What factors confound the results of tests, and how to eliminate them? Which tests? What should we believe, and where do we go from here?

May 6, 2022 Macs, Technology

Does it matter which Thunderbolt ports you use?

There’s evidence to suggest that original M1 Macs write more slowly to external SSDs in some configurations. Does this extend to later models with M1 Pro or Max chips?

May 4, 2022 Macs, Technology

What performance to expect from SSDs

T T Read More

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.

April 22, 2022 Macs, Technology

M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

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.

April 18, 2022 Macs, Technology

Explainer: Benchmarks

Select a test, time it, and compare the result with those from other systems. Choose whether to use a synthetic or application benchmark, and don’t forget your confirmation bias.

April 16, 2022 Macs, Technology

Benchmarking the Mac Studio (Max) and M1 Pro MacBook Pro

Which is faster, a MacBook Pro 16-inch with an M1 Pro, or a Mac Studio with an M1 Max? Tests cover P and E cores, Neural Engine, SSD and more.

April 11, 2022 Macs, Technology

How can you trust a disk to write data?

All disks cache data to be written, which makes benchmarking them tricky. It has more serious consequences which macOS tries to allow for in file systems and backups.

February 18, 2022 Macs, Technology

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