Hey Ganesh, I'd really love to see this type of in depth SSD testing on M2/M1 Macs, the whole youtube sphere just looks at surface level peak sequential transfer rates and calls it a day and thinks they're as fast as DDR2, but that's not the case on mixed file size transfers, random 4k reads/writes, what are the IOPS, etc. I'd love to see Anandtech dig into them.
Linux works on it somewhat, but is still missing a lot as Asahi is having to reverse engineer everything. Asahi might eventually get to a fully usable state prior to the hardware becoming obsolete, but I wouldn't recommend buying one to run Linux at present unless you are helping to reverse engineer it.
You can run Linux today in a container until native support is finalized. Besides, macOS is definitely a "real" OS unless the first guy defines that as only Windows. It's just a troll comment.
How fast do you need the external SSD to run?. If you can stream videos, edit videos, export videos, and transfer data reasonably fast, that's all a consumer needs.
If you want it to perform like a data centre ssd, it's gonna consume WAAY more power
You mentioned edited videos, but I'm not sure you appreciate the bottleneck of transfer speeds during that work flow. Editing 4k/8k video without pulling you hair out requires very fast drives, if you are going to do that on an external, which I can think of many reasons why that might be done, fast external drives are very important. Besides that, running games straight off a fast external SSD benefits console gamers and gamers on systems like the Nvidia Shield.
I bought the T7 Shield 2TB because of the price and the performance consistency. I don't see how the Sandisk competes. They both start out at 1GB/sec, but the Sandisk collapses to 700MBps. For system image backups and assorted files like old MP3s that I only occasionally reference, this drive was the one I've been waiting for at $200. Great value and it's ready for anything I throw at it going forward. My system has Thunderbolt 4 but a drive that maxes out that interface consistently is not going to be this price.
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s-plus - Wednesday, July 20, 2022 - link
I think I need to be a PhD to be able to fully understand this article.tipoo - Wednesday, July 20, 2022 - link
Hey Ganesh, I'd really love to see this type of in depth SSD testing on M2/M1 Macs, the whole youtube sphere just looks at surface level peak sequential transfer rates and calls it a day and thinks they're as fast as DDR2, but that's not the case on mixed file size transfers, random 4k reads/writes, what are the IOPS, etc. I'd love to see Anandtech dig into them.timecop1818 - Thursday, July 21, 2022 - link
You can no longer run a real OS on these so why bother testing? The only people buying them are precisely the YouTube idiot audience, so all is well.tipoo - Thursday, July 21, 2022 - link
Is Linux a "real" OS, because both a native port and VMs work? Should I even engage in this?calc76 - Thursday, July 21, 2022 - link
Linux works on it somewhat, but is still missing a lot as Asahi is having to reverse engineer everything. Asahi might eventually get to a fully usable state prior to the hardware becoming obsolete, but I wouldn't recommend buying one to run Linux at present unless you are helping to reverse engineer it.tipoo - Friday, July 22, 2022 - link
You can run Linux today in a container until native support is finalized. Besides, macOS is definitely a "real" OS unless the first guy defines that as only Windows. It's just a troll comment.web2dot0 - Thursday, July 21, 2022 - link
How fast do you need the external SSD to run?. If you can stream videos, edit videos, export videos, and transfer data reasonably fast, that's all a consumer needs.If you want it to perform like a data centre ssd, it's gonna consume WAAY more power
Hixbot - Tuesday, July 26, 2022 - link
You mentioned edited videos, but I'm not sure you appreciate the bottleneck of transfer speeds during that work flow.Editing 4k/8k video without pulling you hair out requires very fast drives, if you are going to do that on an external, which I can think of many reasons why that might be done, fast external drives are very important.
Besides that, running games straight off a fast external SSD benefits console gamers and gamers on systems like the Nvidia Shield.
artifex - Saturday, July 23, 2022 - link
The beige enclosure reminds me of a fig newton.Flying Aardvark - Saturday, July 23, 2022 - link
I bought the T7 Shield 2TB because of the price and the performance consistency. I don't see how the Sandisk competes. They both start out at 1GB/sec, but the Sandisk collapses to 700MBps. For system image backups and assorted files like old MP3s that I only occasionally reference, this drive was the one I've been waiting for at $200. Great value and it's ready for anything I throw at it going forward. My system has Thunderbolt 4 but a drive that maxes out that interface consistently is not going to be this price.