Fast Storage on iMac

Post date: Apr 04, 2020 7:45:28 AM

Experiments done during Movement Control Order.

All tests were run on AJA Video Systems Test Lite:

Speed of Internal PCIe SSD disk, 256GB. 90% full.

Speed of G-Technology Thunderbolt Drive, 4 TB HDD, connected to Displayport/Thunderbolt port. 80% full.

Speed of Sandisk Extreme SSD, 500GB, connected to USB port. Fresh out of the box.

Speed on Sandisk Fit, low-cost USB drive, 8GB blank disk.

This is a Fit drive... OK for mostly read, sometimes write use cases. On reads, it's still faster than a mechanical hard drive.

The values vary slightly when run repeatedly, but not by much.

Conclusion: nothing can beat internal PCIe.