Apple Mac Studio with M1 Max, 32 GB memory, 2 TB internal SSD, connected to an Apple Studio Display.

Personal testing was performed using two M1 models It’s common wisdom that external USB-C devices can normally be connected to USB-C format ports, including those capable of Thunderbolt 3 or 4, using either a USB-C (data) cable, or a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 cable. In normal testing, 5 Gb/s should yield around 500 MB/s, 10 Gb/s gives around 1200 MB/s, and 20 Gb/s about 2400 MB/s.

The raw transfer speeds given aren’t achieved in practice, because of encoding and other overheads.

USB 3.2 adds two-lane SuperSpeed+ at 10 and 20 Gb/s.Ĭurrently, Apple makes no claims that any ports on its M1 models support USB 3.2, only the more widespread USB 3.1 Gen 2 standard.

USB 3.1 Gen 2 adds SuperSpeed+ at 10 Gb/s.

USB 3.0 onwards supports SuperSpeed USB at 5 Gb/s.

For the purposes of this article, I’ll gloss over a lot of detail and summarise the relevant features as: Unfortunately, standards and terminology for USB 3.x are confusing. This article examines why performance experienced by users falls short of Apple’s claim. However, many users have reported performance which doesn’t reach 10 Gb/s for directly connected external disks. Apple claims that all its new models using M1 series chips come with Thunderbolt ports which support “USB 3.1 Gen 2 (up to 10Gb/s)”.

Conncet mac to pc usb 3.1