But when I looked at its write performance, I realised how quickly it suffered from thermal throttling, as demonstrated in the chart below. I did buy a Samsung X5 512 GB in the hope that moving up to Thunderbolt speed would be worth the extra cost. The files on my external SSD aren’t particularly large or demanding, and I’ve been quite content with transfer speeds around 470-480 MB/s.
It’s a mistake I’ll not make again, and the Mac Studio Max which will replace that iMac Pro has 2 TB inside it. A 2 TB SATA/USB-C (USB 3.1 Gen 2) SSD was considerably cheaper than the additional cost of 2 TB of internal storage, and almost kept the cost of the iMac Pro below £5,000. Wincing more than a little at the cost of the base model with 1 TB internal SSD, I decided that I’d spread much of my existing 1.4 TB from my previous iMac’s Fusion Drive onto external storage, at the time when I was moving away from hard disks.
In my case, it was an error that I made when specifying this iMac Pro. Most of us don’t choose to use external SSDs, except for storage for our backups and large collections of more static files like media libraries. Neither has anyone else come up with an explanation as to why so many others are seeing similarly poor performance from their M1 Macs. Although some claimed this was all just clickbait, it has generated more interest and comments than almost any other topic here, and so far no one has been able to explain away the consistent differences I reported. I then undertook a little experiment in which I measured transfer speeds for the same drive connected to different Macs and ports. It all started with some worrying benchmarks reported by a user, who suggested there was a problem with M1 Macs leading to poor performance of external SSDs connected via USB rather than Thunderbolt. This is only appropriate for the topic which last week consumed more time and words than any other here, Pandora’s peripherals, external SSDs. Pandora’s container was originally a jar rather than a box, an error attributed to Erasmus, and became muddled with a myth about Psyche in the early nineteenth century, when the story suddenly became popular in paintings. One of the best-known tales from classical mythology, of Pandora and her box containing all the world’s evils, is both incorrect and a modern confuddling of two different myths.
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