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:
- 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?
- 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)