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Do SSDs in multi-bay enclosures share Thunderbolt 4 bandwidth?

I am looking around for NVMe SSD enclosures to connect to the Thunderbolt 4 port of a Mac mini M2 Pro. My plan is to have one drive for Time Machine backups, one data drive and a third drive to back up the data drive. So, an enclosure that takes 3 or 4 SSDs would serve this plan.


I am aware that the maximum theoretical PCIe 3.0 bandwidth supported by a Mac mini's Thunderbolt 4 port is 3940 MB/s (4 x 985 MB/s per lane). The maximum practical bandwidth is 22 Gb/s = 2750 MB/s, according to Intel (Figure 7).


I would like to know whether an enclosure with more than one bay has to share this bandwidth. So, for example, if data gets read from two of the external SSDs, would each be limited to 1375 MB/s (2750 / 2)?


Maybe the answer is simply "yes", because any kind of dock, hub etc. that uses a x4 PCIe interface has to share the bandwidth I guess?


Connected to this question are two aspects:


  1. Is there a Thunderbolt 4 chip for every of the four ports on the Mac mini, or do the ports share a chip? With other words, does every port have a dedicated 4-lane PCIe gen 3 data rate or does it get shared across ports?
  2. Do SSD enclosures even make all four lanes available? I have yet to find a product description that addresses this aspect. If only 2 lanes are made available, the data rate for each SSD would be reduced to 687 MB/s in the example above.



Mac mini (M2 Pro, 2023)

Posted on Aug 30, 2023 5:51 AM

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4 replies

Sep 14, 2023 7:05 AM in response to Alexome

After doing more research, this is how I look at this question now:


There are different combinations of three interfaces:

  1. The downstream interface of the enclosure to its SSD
  2. The upstream interface of the enclosure for the host to connect to
  3. The interace of the host port


The combination of these connections results in basically 5 speed categories:



To let multiple SSDs connect at up to the full bandwidth, you could connect them to a Thunderbolt 4 dock. When multiple Thunderbolt 3 PCIe enclosures simutaneously use PCIe, then the bandwidth of 4 lanes of PCIe 3 are shared across all the devices.


That's what I want.


From a practical, human-centered point of view, I would prefer one enclosure that can achieve the same, rather than daisy-chaining.

Aug 30, 2023 11:57 AM in response to Alexome

In the meantine, I have found:


The Thunderbolt port provides 4 PCIe lanes. Therefore, an enlosure for four SSDs will only allocate one lane for each. To use the full Thunderbolt bandwidth, the SSDs have to be put in a RAID configuration to use the 4 lanes simultaneously. An enclosure for 2 SSDs might allocate one or two lanes - something to check before buying.


To check whether there is a Thunderbolt bus for each of the 4 ports, I could use system information later, when a device is connected. (On the late 2017 iMac Pro, two Thunderbolt 3 ports share one Thunderbolt bus, per this 9to5Mac review of the OWC Thunderblade enclosure).


Do SSDs in multi-bay enclosures share Thunderbolt 4 bandwidth?

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