As for waiting for Apple to respond about the things you mentined, don’t bother. I have the 4-port Thunderbolt dock, which is powered. Powered OWC (don’t have others) docks and hubs give you the power to run multiple drives while also charging the Mac. OWC’s non-powered hubs and docks don’t help for Thunderbolt drives. I have been able to run a non-powered external NVMe drive (OWC and others) along with a USB thumb drive connected to the other port using a USB-C to USB-A adaptor. Add a second non-powered and it won’t allow it to mount. Only one non-powered external drive works on the original M1 MBA/MBP. You are correct about the limited voltage.
1787MB/s with display vs 1064MB/s without display.1691MB/s with display vs 1031MB/s without display.The M1 Macs were running Big Sur 11.3 and were connected to either an LG 32UL950-W or a Samsung F32TU872VN display – with speed results being consistent for each display. Our tests consisted of AJA System Test v15.5.3.1, and all results were verified in Black Magic v3.3. The Results External Thunderbolt Drive Performance Improvement When Connecting a Thunderbolt Display to an M1 Mac Simply put, Thunderbolt technology doesn’t use bandwidth for an input (read) video stream. Inquiring minds might ask, “why aren’t the read speeds affected?”
It can then deliver the full PCIe data bandwidth potential to an attached external drive. When a Thunderbolt display is connected to an M1 Mac’s TB4 port, the other Thunderbolt 4 port on the Mac does not need to support video output. Our theory to what causes this dramatic speed increase is that the M1 CPU only supports one video output signal to its TB4 ports.
Subsequent testing on an M1 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air revealed the same speed increase. To double-confirm having a Thunderbolt display attached to an M1 Mac mini creates this speed boost, Brady performed the same test with another Thunderbolt 3-equipped display and found the same increase. When Brady switched the displays, the faster speeds followed the Thunderbolt display. Through the process of elimination, the only variable was that one of the minis was connected to a Thunderbolt 3-equipped display while the other mini was connected to a non-Thunderbolt display via HDMI. As both minis should write to the same external drive at the same speed, Brady began investigating what could cause this anomaly. When connected to a 2TB OWC Envoy Pro EX, Brady found one of the minis wrote to the Envoy Pro EX at much higher speeds. One of our product dev team members, Brady Campbell, came across this while running some tests between two M1 Mac minis. You can get up to 67% FASTER write speed from a Thunderbolt-equipped external drive connected to a Thunderbolt port on an M1 Mac when you ALSO have a Thunderbolt display connected directly to the second Thunderbolt port on your M1 Mac.
Well, we have some breaking news on this subject and you’re reading it here first on the Rocketyard Blog:
It’s been widely covered in posts and videos how external drive performance is unacceptably slow with the M1 Macs.
From performance benchmarking to inform you of your “best-bang-for-the-buck” OWC upgrade to determining which Macs can have double the amount of RAM than what the factory supports, you can count on OWC to be your trusted source for key insights.
Our product development team is constantly taking a deeper look at Apple products-and our own-to see if we can uncover some hidden potential to help you get more from your technology investment. Testing products is a way of life here at OWC and has been nearly from day one. Read on, because we found something interesting… Not getting the write speeds you were expecting with an external drive on your M1 Mac? You’re not alone.