First Thunderbolt 5 SSD test with M4 Max MacBook Pro!
I just got the OWC Envoy Ultra, which I think is the very first Thunderbolt 5 SSD, promising up to twice the speed of Thunderbolt 3 and 4. I wanted to see how much faster it is, how big its cache is for really large copies, and whether it’s any faster on a regular Thunderbolt 4 Mac.
Design
It’s a hefty aluminum drive with a built-in cable. I’m not super stoked about that, since sometimes cables break and you just need to replace them. But it makes the drive more rugged, and it’s dust-proof and waterproof, which is probably why OWC went that way. For comparison, the Thunderbolt 3 Envoy Pro FX is a little smaller with a replaceable cable, and gets around 2,700–2,800 MB/s.
Benchmarks on the M4 Max MacBook Pro
The MacBook Pro’s own 2 TB SSD gets about 6,300–6,500 MB/s write and 5,200–5,300 MB/s read.
The Envoy Ultra in Blackmagic Disk Speed Test: about 5,100 MB/s read and write. That’s about double the Thunderbolt 3 drive. OWC says up to 6,000 MB/s, but who’s counting?
Large file copies
I copied 538 GB of Final Cut Pro project files (mostly large video files) from the internal SSD. The speed held at about 1.7–1.8 GB/s the entire time. It never slowed down, but it was well below the benchmark speed, and I’m not sure why.
The same copy to the Thunderbolt 3 Envoy Pro FX ran at about 2 GB/s, faster than the Thunderbolt 5 drive, before slowing down after about 80–90 GB, which must be its cache size.
I didn’t like those results, so I deleted the files, let the drive sit, and tried again. This time it started at about 5.3 GB/s, then quickly dropped through 3 and 4 GB/s to about 1.8 GB/s. So it has a small cache for very fast transfers, but past a couple of gigabytes it settles around 1.8 GB/s. This was a pretty unscientific test, so take from it what you will.
On a Thunderbolt 4 Mac
- Thunderbolt 3 Envoy Pro FX: just under 1,900 MB/s read and write.
- Thunderbolt 5 Envoy Ultra: about 2,900 MB/s write and just under 3,100 MB/s read.
That’s higher than I usually get from Thunderbolt 3 and 4 drives on those Macs, so not bad at all.
Is it worth it?
Probably not, for most workflows. I edit 4K video and get by fine with a regular 10 Gb/s USB-C SSD. Thunderbolt makes moving large files back and forth a lot faster, but it doesn’t change my actual editing, and Thunderbolt 5 won’t help that either. Its speed also wasn’t consistent in my tests; maybe firmware updates will improve that.
If what you have works, I don’t think it makes sense to buy a Thunderbolt 5 SSD yet. The pricing is really high, but it’s still half of what Apple charges for storage upgrades ($800 for 2 TB, $1,200 for 4 TB), and Thunderbolt 3 drives are cheaper still.
Links
- Thunderbolt 5 SSD
- Thunderbolt 3 SSD
- NVME
- NVME Enclosure
- CalDigit is my dock partner
- https://www.threads.net/@jerryschulzeonyt
- My iPhone Art
- Grovemade Desk Mat and Knife (save 10% JERRY10)
- UNLIMITED Cloud Backup for your Mac with Backblaze
In this video
Some links in this post are affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I may receive a small commission. See my ethics statement.
