the best thunderbolt external hard drive for mac server

The Best Thunderbolt External Hard Drive Server Mac And Its

Both the Intel Optane 900P and the Samsung 970 EVO I tried next bumped those numbers up a good 100 MBps.

The Best Thunderbolt External Hard Drive Server Mac And Its

I was perfectly happy with my 2011 27-inch Core i7 iMac and its SATA SSD upgrade when I heard that the company had finally started supporting third-party NVMe as of macOS High Sierra.

My iMac (old as it is) replaced a Windows PC with an NVMe SSD, and though the iMac is a far superior experience overall, I missed the speed of the NVMe SSD running the operating system.

Boot Camp, Logic Pro X.great stuff, but if I could just add NVMe and run macOS from it.

In case you arent aware, NVMe is fasttwo to six times the sustained throughput of SATA (depending on the drive), with, at times, one-tenth the seek latency.

If youve used a MacBook Pro from the last couple of years, youll understand: Apps pop open, files load and save in an instant, and boot times are ridiculous.

The thing for me is, covering storage for PCWorld has its perks.

Just lying around were an Akitio Thunder3 PCIe enclosure, as well as several PCIe NVMe drives left over from reviews.

All I needed was a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 12 adapter for NVMe rapture, right Hah After updating to High Sierra, Murphys law caught up with me big time.

Seemed to me that any old Thunderbolt 12 to Thunderbolt 3 adapter should work.

As it turns out, only one of the several on the market will do the job, and thats Apples 50 adapter shown below.

Apple.

This experiment was the exact opposite, a Thunderbolt 3 device to a Thunderbolt 1 port.

The early-to-market models I tried initiallythe aforementioned Aktio Thunder3 PCIe and Akitio Node work fine on Windows PCs, but they use TIs 65982 communications chip, which predates Apples adoption of Thunderbolt 3.

Any enclosure using this chip with throw the message you see below.

Wrong again. Shut up Murphy I should point out that I couldve avoided all this with the Akitio Thunder2 PCIe, which I later acquired for testing.

Its completely compatible with Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2 Macs.

Also, Thunderbolt is the future and performs much better on newer Macs.

And theres only a minor performance penalty with the adapter.

NVMe: Modern implementations required In my testing for PCWorlds Akitio Thunder3 PCIe review with a 1.2TB Intel 750 NVMe PCIe SSD inside, the combo read at about 2 GBps and wrote at well over 1 GBps.

Nice, but I certainly wasnt expecting the same results on a Thunderbolt 1 port, with an adapter, and older 2nd generation Intel CPU in play.

Neither was I expecting the 350 MBps reading and writing that the Node Lite Intel 750 combo initially delivered on my iMac.

The Apple Thunderbolt adapter is required to use it on Thunderbolt 1 or 2 Macs.

Thats better than the 529 MBps and 499 MBps my iMacs internal Samsung 860 Pro delivers, but hardly the 800 MBps to 900 MBps I was hoping for.

Seek times were halved, but again, not the 10-times reduction that Id hoped for.

The Best Thunderbolt External Hard Drive For Mac Server