Those of you who know me, know that I’ve spent the last 44 years working with Apple products. I was the first third-party developer they ever hired, back in 1978, when one loaded programs from a cassette tape recorder. It has been a long journey, if not a bit strange, but here I am.

I point this out because I’m going to complain now.

The SoC M1 is a minor miracle, to be sure. But also to be sure it has some serious I/O problems as well.

Everyone rightly groaned when all we got for I/O was two Tunderbolt ports. We were going to have to replace gawd-knows how much stuff, just to get back to level. But HEY! TB ports were the best thing since sliced forever!

Or not.

Poorly implemented and only half useful, I lament having to write this, and will now show you how I got my head above water. (It was not cheap!)

Issues: TB ports dont work at full speed
TB -> USB is almost too slow to be used (absolutely NOT 10GB/s!)
Apple does NOT LIKE NVMe’s in USB enclosures, or even in most TB enclosures
not to mention “see previous post.”

My starting point is the first-generation M1s: I have a MacBook Air and a Mac Mini. But, as I noted in my previous post, things were not right in Smallville. Screamingly fast external storage turned out to be -slower- than the Intel machines!

I’m done with the whining and the history now, and here’s the chase, cut to so you can move forward yourself.

I now have this extra gear:

Caldigit hub
Sabrent dual NVMe enclosure
OWC Thunderbolt port expander
SoftRAID

https://caldigit.com a T3, (and will buy the T4 when it arrives.)
https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Thunderbolt-Tool-Free-Enclosure-EC-T3DN
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB4HUB5P/
https://www.owcdigital.com/products/softraid

Here’s how it’s set up:

M1 TB port out is connected to CalDigit (CD) T3 in.
CD T3’s only TB out is connected to OWC Hub in.
SoftRAIDed dual NVMe in Sabrent enclosure is connected to OWC Hub TB out
NVMe in USB enclosure connected to the (one and only) USB 3.2 / 10G on the hub.

(IOW: m1 to CD to hub to devices)

Dual encl is now (read/write) 2538/2382
USB/NVMe is now 949/871 (almost triple previous readings)

What to expect IRL:

https://www.everythingusb.com/speed.html

This setup is providing me at least satisfactory speed. It does what I (apparently wrongly) expected the M1 to do all by itself.

To get it to work, I spent:

$300 on the CalDigit;
$170 on the dual enclosure
$50 on softRAID “basic”
$180 on the OWC Hub

$700, or about 2/3 of the cost of the MacBook Air itself, or $100 MORE than the cost of the Mini.

I suspect that all this is because of Apple’s choice for and configuration of the TB controllers they use.

In any case “it just works” could not be further from the truth.

As impressive as they were when tehy landed, now that they have been walking around for a while, the glow has worn off.

Apple needs to acknowledge this and fix it (and then figure out how to make it right for those of us who had to pay through the nose to fix their problems.

Regretfully

Tracy Valleau