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How Thunderbolt 5 can be faster or not
Early reports of Thunderbolt 5 performance have been mixed. This article starts from Thunderbolt 3 and dives deeper into the TB5 specification to explain why it might not deliver the performance you...
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Tune for Performance: Do you really need a big internal SSD?
The most common economy that many make when specifying their next Mac is to opt for just 512 GB internal storage, and save the $/€/£600 or so it would cost to increase that to 2 TB. After all, if you...
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Will that hub or dock slow your SSDs, or even make them faster?
They might all connect to the same ports, but Thunderbolt 3, 4, 5, USB 3 and USB4 are disturbingly different, and few deliver the performance that their up-tos promise. From the figures that I see here...
View ArticleWhy use APFS?
Although your Mac’s boot volume group, including the Data volume that’s almost always used for your Home folder, has to be in APFS format, you can still use Macintosh Extended or HFS+ format for other...
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Thunderbolt 5 SSDs are promising, but fill their cache quicker
As the first batches of Thunderbolt 5 SSDs are starting to ship, this is a good time to take stock of what we have seen so far. Here I include some current results obtained from testing one of these...
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macOS Sequoia 15.3 has improved Thunderbolt 5 performance
There have been many reports of problems with Thunderbolt 5 support in Apple’s latest MacBook Pro and Mac mini models with M4 Pro and Max chips. Among the more concerning have been poor performance...
View ArticleShould you pay a premium price for a bigger internal SSD?
With more new M4 Macs in the offing, one question that I’m asked repeatedly is whether you should save money by getting a Mac with the smallest internal SSD and extend that using cheaper external...
View ArticleWhy SSDs slow down, and how to avoid it
Fast SSDs aren’t always fast when writing to them. Even an Apple silicon Mac’s internal SSD can slow alarmingly in the wrong circumstances, as some have recently been keen to demonstrate. This article...
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Take control of disks using APFS
If you want a quiet life, just format each external disk in APFS (with or without encryption), and cruise along with plenty of free space on it. For those who need to do different, either getting best...
View ArticleBetter security means less recoverability
In the last couple of weeks I’ve been asked to help recover data lost when files have been accidentally deleted, and an internal SSD has been wiped remotely using Find My Mac. What we perhaps haven’t...
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