External Thunderbolt HDD being identified as an Internal PCI-Express SSD
I had to replace the 3TB internal Apple Fusion drive due to Smart errors.
I purchased a Samsung SSD 870 EVO 4TB to replace the drive. I then placed the old drive (Seagate Desktop HDD 3TB) into an external OWC ThunderBay 6 enclosure with Thunderbolt 3 ports.
When I open Disk Utility the old drives appears under "Internal". When I bring up the details of the drive it identifies the connection as PCI-Express and Solid state as Yes?
The other thing that appears to be weird is when I test the speed of the old and new drives, the SSD has read/write speeds of 530MB/s and the old HDD, connected through thunderbolt, has read/write speeds of 2,500MB/s and 1,700MB/s.
I have a second drive in the OWC enclosure. It shows as being connected via SATA. This gets a read/write speed of only 230/293 MB/s.
So here are my questions:
1/ Why does the old drive show as being connected via PCI-Express and not as SATA like the second drive in the enclosure?
2/ Why does Disk Utility identify the old drive as being internal and SSD?
3/ Why are the read/write speeds so high and not comparable to the second drive in the enclosure?
4/ Why is the SSD speed so much slower than the old drive? Did I format the SSD incorrectly?
Speed testing was done using Techtool Pro (latest version)
System: MacOS Monterey 12.4
Mac: iMac (Retina 5K, 27" 2017)
iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 11.1