From the original Macintosh 128K in 1984, through the divergence into SE and Mac II, then the unique Twentieth Anniversary Mac, to the first iMac in 1998, and its successors.
USB
ADB, which could fry your Mac’s motherboard iif you weren’t careful, USB that opened up a new world of different cables and adaptors, and wireless with Bluetooth.
If you want it to have full TRIM and SMART support, it’ll need to have an NVMe interface and a Thunderbolt connection.
There’s a big difference between the storage that’s available, and what’s advisable. Whether it’s affordable is another question.
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?
Fundamentally a combination of PCI Express and DisplayPort, with substantial power supply, there are several reasons why you won’t get the whole 40 Gb/s from external storage.
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.
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?
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.
Apple wants us to run our Macs at Full Security and not use third-party kernel extensions, but refuses to build S.M.A.R.T. access into USB in macOS.
The Eclectic Light Company 