I also have a ssd in a very cheap usb 3 enclosure and it only gets 500mb/s. But now I will wait for nvme price to come down. Every time I do a backup I have to wait a week on my 8tb drives. As well note that the orico does not work with older mac's without thunderbolt 3.Īfter using my 1tb nvme - its clear to me that over time I am going to move my 16tb to nvme. Take note as well that Imac's share the thunderbolt bus, whereas the studio does not.

There are nvme drives faster than 2500 but I have not yet seen an enclosure that can take advantage of it. So any item in the path can drop you to slower so don't go this way unless you have a newer mac with thunderbolt 3 and the best connections. If you connect via usb 3 - the speed drops in 1/2. If your connection cord is not high quality it drops down in speed.

if you use other than thunderbolt 3 it is slow. The samsung 1tb nvme does not play as well with orico because of the chipset in Orico. But everything has to be perfect to get 2500mb/s. I have a nvme 1tb wd black nvme and a thunderbolt 3 enclosure (orico) and it is very fast 2500mb/s. The key thing is to get a drive or enclosure with a Thunderbolt 3/4 connection for best speeds, USB C will not be as fast no matter that (the up to 10Gb/s) specifications might imply it will be as fast. Sabrent is very fast as well on Mac silicon machines After a lot of online research and watching Gordon Laing's YouTube video I purchased the same items he did, the Orico enclosure and Samsung 980 SSD-I got the 2TB one. I decided to add an external SSD to my base model Mac Studio to use as my primary photo editing drive. Other World Computing has them all and have excellent tech support to get you straightened out. For that performance level you need specific drive enclosures and matching drives. The standard SSD's that have been available for the last several years all top out at around 500-600 mb/sec read write but there are newer SSD protocols which are slipping my mind right now that offer read/write speeds in the 2000-2500 mb/sec range. I haven't followed SSDs in the last couple of years. If I were to go external SSD route, what are the good options. Currently a little less than 4TB is taken.

Currently I have a 2 bay USB3.2 QNAP TR002 which I use with 2 WD 10TB red drives.

Thunderbolt external ssd for mac