OWC’s latest drive is USB4, so it supports USB4, USB 3.2, USB 2 AND Thunderbolt 3 & 4, which is $119.99 empty and up to $1299.99 for an 8TB.
I just find it exciting for future OWC products to all be USB 4 so compatible with everything.
And according to Mac Performance Guide the large version is fast, faster than internal Mac Pro drives!
You can read about it at AppleInsider or also the Thunderbolt experts at OWC.
I love that it will continue using the USB C port, but the fact that it allows so much more power scares me as it means hubs will be even more expensive, and I use so little in powered from the ports. I would love the speed though, and even better for video, so you could get better resolution at higher frame rates.
And you know this will show up in an Apple product first, maybe the next Mac Studio? That would make sense to me.
Scharon Harding at Ars Technica has this article on Thunderbolt hits 80Gbps in demo, equaling USB4 Version 2.0 Speeds. Good to see thunderbolt catch up to the newly proposed USB spec, but for it to keep going they should be pushing the limits and doubling the USB Speeds.
Honestly it is mostly about keeping compatibility with Thunderbolt devices, for those who have them, and I have a lot of them, and so I need compatiblity and not just with the connector, so lets hope Intel keeps the licensing prices inexpensive, so that machines are both thunderbolt 4 and USB 4.
Ben Lovejoy has the slightly confusing report.
It seems M1 macs don’t support 10gb USB 3.1 Gen 2 and only 10gb for USB 3.2 which should reach 20gb, so don’t officially support usb 4 which would have to include both of those.
So it basically supports the 5gb of Usb 3.1 Gen 1, and 3.2 is dual, so 2 5gb, but full thunderbolt 4 40gb.
Intel macs supported USB 3.1 Gen 2 at 10GB, but also only supported USB 3.2 at 10gb.
I don’t know if this is licensing, saving money or just bad implementation on their own chip design. This is a huge mistake and one I wish Apple would deal with in the future (i bet it is hardware and not software).
Honestly he hits the nail on the head on all of these, and I still remember my disappointment on the trashcan Mac Pro when it came out, though amazing how something similar with Apple Silicon, without any expandabillity except for Thunderbolt 4, and now I am excited for it.
How things have changed! Of course the built in Pro Res acceleration will certainly be a boon for editing, but I guess also running on an iMac Pro for the last few years has shown me that I don’t need that much expandability except for more damn Thunderbolt 4/USB C ports (as I already have 2 OWC Thunderbolt 4 hubs, and could use more ports).
This is because PCIe 6.0 has officially been released, though there is no hardware that supports it yet, while the 2019 MacPro is on PCI 3 which was released in 2010. It is pretty bad since PCIe 4 was released a 2 years before the MacPro, and PCIe 5.0 has been out since 2019.
I am still excited for the next MacPro, though I doubt it will have any user available PCIe slots anyway, though hopefully it’s hard drive attaches faster than PCI 3. Likely it’s only expansion will be Thunderbolt 4 (which it will hopefully have more than 2 buses and 4 ports).
So pretty exciting, especially since it keeps the USB C form factor and doubles it’s speed from 40Gbps to 80Gbps.
Already I love being able to use Thunderbolt 4 hubs on my Mac, and hopefully the new Mac Pro will use Thunderbolt 5 for impressive speeds from it’s ports.
OWC is reporting on what is obviously a bug with M1 Macs, because you shouldn’t have to connect a second display to get full speed write on the thunderbolt ports, but at least for now it seems you do.
Man Big Sur has been having some serious software issues when it comes to drives (losing support for SoftRaid for a full versions was huge!).
EDIT:
Since writing this OWC has figured out more ways to get the speed boost, check it out.
The OWC RocketYard Blog has a really interesting article on how the new M1 Macs actually have 2 thunderbolt busses even though they only have 2 ports. This is unlike previous Thunderbolt macs which had 4 thunderbolt ports, but only 2 busses, with 2 ports split on each bus. The new M1 Macs have only 2 ports but 2 busses, and with the new ability to use USB4 Hubs to split thunderbolt you can have the more ports.
