Does OS Sonoma fix a known glitch on the external transfer bandwidth/speed on MacBook Pro M1 Pro Max?

MaxSpeed9122 wrote:

I have a 2023 MacBook Pro M1 Max with an internal 8TB SSD and 64gb RAM. Additionally, it is equipped with several supposed Thunderbolt 4 ports that should support transfer rates of 40GB/s.

Right out of the box in March, this has never been the case. At best, I always top out around 5GB/s.

Well, the first problem is that Thunderbolt 4 is incapable of transferring at speeds of 40GB/s. The maximum speed of Thunderbolt 4 is 40Gb/s (or 5GB/s). Note the upper & lower case "B". This makes a huge difference especially if you want to complain about performance issues. If you are going to discuss performance, then using the correct units is absolutely critical.

Intel's own specification for Thunderbolt 4 clearly mentions 40Gb/s max speed.

Sometimes the maximum bandwidth may include limitations like only allowing 20Gb/s up and 20Gb/s down since data needs to be flowing in both directions to some extent. 20 up + 20 down = 40 total. (or it may be 30 up and 10 down). So right there you may already have a lower maximum limit to reach. This is just a fictional example of a possible limitation. I believe this occurs for connecting external displays as one real world example...not sure of the values, but the output rate to the display must be higher than the rate coming into the computer.

Most single SSDs have a max speed of 3GB/s (note upper case "B"), but some newer higher end models may be able to achieve about 7.5GB/s. Most times you need to connect multiple devices before you reach the protocol's maximum bandwidth (aka speed or transfer rate). It gets even more complicated because the actual amount of user data that can be transferred will be even less since extra support data must be included in the transfer process which will lower that real world transfer speeds. You will never reach the maximum speed due to this overhead.

We are missing too many important details here.

What device are you using...need exact make & model?

What protocol(s) does that external device actually support? Many people get confused that a USB-C connector does not indicate the device supports the Thunderbolt protocol. A USB-C connector also does not necessarily indicate the device supports the USB protocol. There are some devices with USB-C connectors which support no data transfer protocols, but instead only support device charging. USB-C is just the name of the connector type/style. If a manufacturer is smart & helpful, then the USB-C port/connector should include a symbol of the protocol supported by the particular USB-C port. If no symbol is shown, then it is usually best to assume it only supports the USB protocol at best (which version, who knows), but you should check the product's documentation to confirm the protocol(s) supported by that USB-C port (even the product documentation can be very misleading since manufacturers will try to make their device appear faster than it really is capable). Even I have trouble identifying the actual speed of some devices even when reading the product details and delving into the harder to find product documentation & data sheets.

What speed does the externally connected devices support?

How are you measuring these speeds?

How are these external devices connected? May even need to know the make & model of adapters, cables, docks, hubs, etc.

What are all the other connected devices? What apps & jobs are being done within macOS? These other devices and software will also impact the performance. How much Free space is on your internal boot SSD (take careful note that I mentioned "Free" space as opposed to "Available" since the latter is not always able to be used at this time while the former can be used immediately.....a very unfortunate choice Apple has made to describe storage on macOS since "Available" is very misleading to users)?

Sometimes an external device may not be getting enough power to operate at peak speeds, so that is something else that needs to be investigated whenever you look at performance issues.

Even if you have an SSD capable of fast speeds, you may only get those speeds when reading from the SSD. Writing to an SSD will usually be slower, sometimes much slower. SSD write speeds are impacted by how much data is being transferred & how hot the SSD gets (longer transfers & higher temps may actually cause the speeds to be throttled, sometimes severely). Also how much free space is on the SSD can impact an SSDs write performance as well.

Some devices may not even be compatible (or fully compatible) with an Apple Silicon Mac (usually occurs with older devices). Other external devices may cause compatibility issues with other devices which in turn can affect performance.

It appears you have a MacBook Pro 16" M2 Max.

The only relevant link for reference to transfer rates is this one since all the other links are referencing this one and don't really do anything except to repeat only some of what was mentioned in this article:

https://eclecticlight.co/2023/02/28/getting-best-performance-from-thunderbolt-on-apple-silicon-macs-a-practical-guide/

If you read that article, the difference transfer rate issues for some Macs comes down to whether each USB-C port is independent or whether two ports share the same bus. If two USB-C ports share the same bus, then naturally the 40Gb/s is shared between the two shared USB-C ports. There is nothing a user can do about this since it is a hardware design decision made by Apple. The best a user can do is identify which two ports share the same bus and only use one of those two shared ports.

Now, there are ways to optimize USB transfer rates. Make sure your drives all support the UASP protocol which changes how the data transfers are handled which are more efficient than traditional USB transfers. Each USB device in the chain to the USB SSD must all support the UASP protocol. UASP also helps if you connect an older USB1/2 device or a USB3 device which does not support UASP since the dock/hub with UASP support will keep the USB3 drives supporting UASP transferring in the newer more optimal way.

I didn't get anything out of the following link as it appears utterly worthless for anything related to transfer rates (the external drive disconnects during system sleep is known and is usually resolved by not allowing the external drive to sleep):

https://benfrain.com/the-thunderbolt-usb-c-ports-on-m1-macs-dont-work/

Certainly none of the supplied links actually show any speed transfer tests with specific details on how the tests were performed. Howard Oakley's article (eclecticlight.co site) is the closest thing as he explains how some Apple Silicon Macs share their Thunderbolt bus with two USB-C ports.

Usually the only people who actually perform detailed tests & benchmarks are associated with a couple tech sites like Toms Hardware and Anandtech...sometimes even they don't do very well with their benchmarking test reviews. Not very many people performing benchmark tests actually look into the reasons why benchmarks don't meet expectations. Remember how many items I mentioned which must be accounted for when looking at transfer rates. I wasn't even considering Howard Oakley's assertion that a Thunderbolt bus would be shared among two USB-C ports.

MaxSpeed9122 wrote:

I think I've realized my REAL issue here though. When I migrated my old MBP to this M2 Max with the migration tool, all of my files were brought over. Then, as I restalled software (Dropbox, Drive, One Drive, iCloud), I did not realize that all of those things were synching everything to each other as well as my local drive...causing me in some cases to have anywhere from 4-12 copies of every file, all in different folder locations on the local drive. Short story: My hard drive was full and there was not enough head room for anything to move. It was a traffic jam.

I have found you must wait a while for things to settle down. Even after booting the Mac and reaching the Desktop, I will wait at least 15 minutes to 30 minutes usually because macOS and the third party apps are all scanning & checking for updates before I begin to check system performance....sometimes I will wait even longer.

Short story: My hard drive was full

Make sure you always have at least 20GB+ of Free storage space at all times or bad things will happen. With an APFS file system if you run out of Free space, then it may become impossible to delete any files to free up space due to how the APFS file system works.

40gbps divided by 8 is equal to 5 this is calculattion

<< Right out of the box in March, this has never been the case. At best, I always top out around 5GB/s. >>

I find mentally moving across order-of-magnitude boundaries confusing (Gigabit speeds to Megabit speeds) so forgive me if I step down a notch to state everything in terms of Megabits and MegaBytes.

A rotating magnetic drive typically tests between 50 and 100 M Bytes/sec top transfer speed, regardless of its connection, because the rotation of the bits under the Read/Write head is the limiting factor.

A genuine Thunderbolt connection to a genuine Thunderbolt drive-enclosure is a nominal 40,000 M bits/sec connection, on which you can typically call 32,000 M bits/sec including overhead. If you divide by 8, that means any speed approaching (32,000 divided by 8 or) 4,000 M Bytes/sec is Phenomenal.

Your devices are already running as fast as anyone can expect.

Continued:

Doing some research around different forums, articles and such, I find that I am not alone in my transfer woes. It is a known glitch at the time of manufacturing and needed a firmware patch immediately as it does not fully support the stated bandwidth.

Does OS Sonoma address this bug in the update?

I am not aware of any issues that you are describing. You really should provide links to such information, just make sure they are from credible & reliable sources.

As you can see from all my questions & notes above, it is not always simple & straight forward. A lot of things can factor into why people are not getting the speeds they are expecting. So be very careful believing all the horror stories out there since people don't always have all the critical details.

I hope what I posted previously helps you to realize the complexity of the problem and better understand just some of the things which can affect real world performance values.

Also, will my touchkey (fingerprint scanner button) still be functional after the big update?

If you mean the built-in TouchID on the laptop, then I would expect it to be functional after the upgrade to Sonoma. That would be a big oversight in Apple's testing if it did not work. If you are referring to a third party item, then only the manufacturer/developer of that third party item will have the answer.

Continued:

I have been stumped as to what the best solution would be for me as far as an external drive - I NEED speed, but my files can sometimes be 6-10GB. I want to transfer my files quickly - not a week at a time.

I cannot recommend anything since I usually build my own external drives and I haven't researched any NVMe based SSDs since I haven't needed their speed for anything. It is hard to say what to recommend for off the shelf pre-built external SSDs. Usually OWC is a good vendor for reliable devices, but I'm not sure their USB3 devices actually support the UASP protocol...if they mention UASP, then they should be good. Their Thunderbolt devices should be good though.

Eventually, I want to build a server with tons of room to expand (up to 20 drives) where I can store my files and access them from anywhere in the world, but that's another project with a pretty hefty build price on it. This will eliminate my need to subscribe to cloud services and have multiple copies of the same file and different versions on each device. It will also serve as my Time Machine backup and a Plex server.

This can be complicated and will only be as fast as the network connection between the Mac and the file server (assuming the drives on the file server are fast & efficient).

Another consideration for network shares is that macOS has been known to have SMB issues for at least a year especially with macOS 13.x Ventura. You should research those SMB issues before going down this route. The Apple forums have been full of people reporting SMB issues with Ventura.

Until I get to that point, though, I need something in the interim to help me restructure my folder structure and eliminate the duplication mess. I was looking at trying to figure out how to make a Seagate Exos 2x18 (12GB/s SAS) connect directly to my new MBP. I guess there's not a logical way to do that.

I cannot assist with this since I am not a macOS software expert. I recall seeing a respected regular contributor suggesting a third party app to help eliminate duplicate items, but I don't recall the details as it was a while ago.

As for your Seagate Exos drives, I have no idea because it depends on the enclosure being used (or are they part of a Windows server?).

FYI, don't place things into the "Additional Text" field except for log files & reports which would be too long to post here otherwise. It makes it difficult to read and quote, plus most people reading the thread won't look through it later on. I have quoted most of the section, but I did leave out some sections related to your dealings with Apple. If your post goes beyond the 5,000 character limit, then just post two smaller posts instead like I have done with my reply here.

You blurted out that you were using More than One Third-party file Sync services. The correct number to use ON A MAC for top performance is ZERO.

What these third-party File Sync-ers do is read every file on your Mac, non-stop, looking for changed files. When completed, they do it all again. This cripples performance, but in a non-intuitive way.

These utilities read the drive, doing I/O at top speed until the System Queues are full, then MacOS suspends them to wait for results. This completely clogs I/O performance, and brings you Mac to a crawl. BUT -- they are NEVER top of the list in Activity Monitor, even though EACH ONE is crippling performance!

And you were running FOUR of these!

The reason is that third-party file sync-ers are PORTED -- not re-written -- for the Mac. They ignore the Mac File System Event Store, which could tell them instantly which folders had recently changed, which COULD allow them to work with very low performance impact. They don't care.

Mac-native Utilities including Time Machine and iCloud Drive do not scan the disk. They use the Mac File System Event Store, and complete backing up every changed file on your Mac in a few minutes instead of what would 'normally' take all afternoon (to scan the entire drive for changed items).

If you MUST use third-party File Sync-ers, DO NOT launch at Login. [Remove them from the login Items pane in Users&Groups.]. launch only when needed, and quit them or Restart when Sync is complete.

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This same complaint of 'PORTED, not re-written, crippling performance' can be made of third-party Virus Scanners. they do the same 'trick' of reading your files Non-stop. In this case such utilities are simply NOT NEEDED on your already well-protected Mac, and should be removed an NEVER re-installed.

"On the cloud" is great for sharing photos, but is not a viable backup solution for everything you have. The stuff is not under your control, and is subject to sloppy handling, arbitrary changes in policy, theft, accidental deletion, data loss [are they making frequent backups using best practices?], and discontinuation of the service. It can easily take three days to restore it at ordinary Internet speeds.

If you do not have a recent local, disk-based backup, your computer is like a ticking Time bomb. You are only one disk failure, one crazy software, or one "oops" away from losing EVERYTHING! Drives do not last forever. It is not a question of IF it will fail, only WHEN it will fail. In addition, you never know when crazy software or Pilot Error throws away far more than you intended.

If you are using another direct-to-disk backup method that you prefer, and you currently have a recent disk-based backup, that is great. If not, you should consider using Built-in Time Machine. Take steps to acquire an external drive as soon as possible. If you buy one, a drive 2 to 3 times or larger than your boot drive is preferable for long term trouble-free operation. Do not pay extra for a drive that is fast.  (You can get by for a while with a "found" smaller drive if necessary, but it will eventually become annoying).

Attach your external drive and use

System preferences > Time machine ...

... to turn on Time Machine and specify what drive to store your Backups on.  It may ask to initialize the new drive, and that is as expected.

Time machine works quietly and automatically in the background, without interrupting your regular work, and only saves the incremental changes (after the first full backup). Time machine backs up every connected drive that is in a Mac compatible format. it can not back up Windows format drives.

Time Machine's "claim to fame" is that it is the backup that gets done, because it does not ruin performance of the rest of the computer while doing its backup operations. You do not have to set aside a "Special Time" when you only do backups. When you need it, your Time machine Backup is much more likely to be there.

How to use Time Machine to Backup or Restore your Mac:

Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support