M1 iMac is Consumer Grade but Are There No Consumer Grade 40Gb/s Drives?

[thenahon]

I just recently bout my send M1 Mac, the 2021 iMac. It has two Thunderbolt 3 - USB 4 ports which claim speeds up to 40Gb/s. However, when looking for an external SSD that can support those speeds, I am really only finding drives with those speeds at prices higher than a Mac.

Are there really no SSDs out there than can support this speed?

Am I missing something?

Edit: Tagged the post as thunderbolt4 but meant thunderbolt3….oh well

 

[BrianBaughn]

Isn't that just the total bandwidth capability? Did you see something that inferred that there's a drive at that speed?

 

[chabig]

Are there really no SSDs out there than can support this speed?

That's right. As BrianBaughn said, 40Gbps is just the maximum capacity of the Thunderbolt channel, which supports multiple devices transmitting and receiving simultaneously. You won't find a single device that can saturate the channel.

 

[LordVic]

I just recently bout my send M1 Mac, the 2021 iMac. It has two Thunderbolt 3 - USB 4 ports which claim speeds up to 40Gb/s. However, when looking for an external SSD that can support those speeds, I am really only finding drives with those speeds at prices higher than a Mac.

Are there really no SSDs out there than can support this speed?

Am I missing something?

Edit: Tagged the post as thunderbolt4 but meant thunderbolt3….oh well

Honestly, very very limited

in the computer world, SSD's have been mostly limited to chipspeeds. and with PCI-E Gen 3 still being the standard up until the last year (heck, still not even standard on intel platform), faster single drives were just not really being a top priority

with Gen4 now being more common, we're seeing faster SSD's start to hit the market. the Samsung 980 Pro using the Gen4 bus will hit close to the theoretical max 40gbps (minus overhead and other bandwidth usages). But it's and internal NVME drive and you'd have to find an external conversion case with support for those speeds to get it external

However, if you're going external, and you are mostly looking for a desktop based external storage array that does hit the speeds, it can be built using data spanning such as RAID-0. An external box with 2 or 4 NVME drives in RAID-0 or 10 would give you near 40gbps speeds (or as close the interface allows)

 

[frou]

The value for money way to get a good-enough external TB3 drive is to buy something like the $80 JEYI brand TB3 enclosure from AliExpress, then find a good deal on a performance M.2 SSD module to put inside it.