Performance of SSD disks on Mac Mini M1 per USB 3.2 gen 2

Many thanks!

Your posting contained interesting information.

I never saw a statement from Apple about USB-C connections being USB4 (while dropping support for some older protocols).

Do you have a link?

I just see this from https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/

• USB 4 (up to 40Gb/s)
• USB 3.1 Gen 2 (up to 10Gb/s)

Without further explanations.

If you are right, that the USB4 implementation is hardware based and just dropped some of the 3.1 / 3.2 gen 2 protocols without further notice from Apple, any M1 device get's much less interesting for anyone with a serious investment in external drives (like me).

That means, I will not get any additional M1 devices and wait if this get's fixed my M1X or M2.

Thanks for youyr reply!

P.S. It is massively annoying that this forum does not allow to reply to posting!

I again got this: "You’ve exceeded the posting limits. Please try again in a few minutes."

This should really be fixed!

Imagine someone who got 100 answers and he wants to reply to all of them!

He would need days ...

Sorry, but this is not true.

As long as you have no other of technical details, the following is the official statement from Apple, as I posted above:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201163

Up to 10 Gb/s without any details about which connector is meant.

But:

https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/

Here it get's clear that this meant only for the USB-C connectors, not USB-A (which are 5 Gb/s)

From https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201163 I can only see this:

USB 3 (USB 3.1 Gen 2)Up to 10 Gbps 

Again, the same as from the M1 page.

No information about protocols not supported, be it by the OS or the hardware.

Just saying ;-)

You did not read the above comments, it seems.

This problem is very widespread and devices from many vendors have the same problem.

Those devices are Gen 2 with "1x2" specification and are totally valid.

The techncial explanation is also explained above:

Apple does not support all valid USB 3.2 gen 2 protocols anymore, while they did in former Macs!

Dropping support for something needs to be documented, of course!

And of course, this is a problem with Apple as they changed their Mac hardware (and/or software) and dropped support, without any mention.

Just read above to get the details.

I attach the graphic from @woodmeister50

That's the problem.

Apply is not fully clear in that works and what not.

Here is a lenghly discussion about this:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/usb-on-m1-macs-isnt-actually-10gb-s-also-definitely-not-usb4.2269777/

They are only offering one USB lane to devices, not two.

And my question is, if this is just a bad situiation in macOS which can be fixed, or if this problem is hardware based.

The internal SSD in the M1 reached 2800 MB/s for me.

I now ordered a TB disk to check the performance.

Thanks.

I also have the OWC Thunderbolt 4 Dock and was initially suspecting it the source of the problems.

I even bought a CalDigit Element Hub to compare performance.

I only a short time ago learned about the general M1 performance problems - but in this very forum, I did not yet read any explanantion from Apple about this!

There is no point in contacting Apple Support.

I tried this some times and finally learned, that Apple Support can and will only help with using Apple stuff as this Apple stuff currently is.

For basic questions. Very basic questions.

They even cannot help with the "pmset" command or similar things.

I seek some way to open something like a ticket or case at Apple and thought this forum to be something like this.

Any idea how I could contact Apple for this?

I just need to know, if the M1 only have a macOS problem that can be fixed, and if it will be fixed.

Or if this is a hardware problem that cannot be fixed.

In this case, I will change my plans for buying more Apple stuff ... maybe jump on the next generation, if that problem will be fixed then.

Apple needs to open their mouth to deliver proper support for their products!