Originally Posted By: Matt Finley
I don’t have M2 SSD drives in my six-year old PC. I do have three SSD drives.

From what I’ve read, you could expect to double your throughput by using an M2 drive over a regular SSD.


Try 3–6x.

A SATA III (2.5”) SSD is rated 500–560 R/W, about the same in a USB 3 external. There is no way to get these faster other than pairs in a RAID 0 or 10 array.

A ‘slow’ m.2 blade like a Crucial P2 is rated 2000 internal, 1550 in an external USB 3.2 enclosure due to the 2 lane limit.

A ‘fast’ m.2 blade like the 970 EVO is rated 2800 in a Thunderbolt 3 external enclosure, 1550 over USB 3.2 and 3600 internal on a PCI 4 lane bus. Multiple blades will increase capacity if configured RAID 0 but the 4 lane limit will reduce speed (4 blades will each use 1 lane).

NVMe 4 x4 will not be faster in a PCI 3 bus — doesn’t work that way.

PCI 4 and 5 are faster only if using m.2 blades designed for these bus standards. Google is your friend.

Over at Apple

The new M1 Mac Studios with single blades (512GB, 1TB) are rated 5600 as the M1 Mini. Those with twin blades (8TB onboard) are rated 8000. No one has torn down the 2TB and 4TB Studio to see if those SSDs are single or twin blades—the Mini is single only. This applies to the M1 MBPro and MBAir. Older Intel TB3 Macs like the iMac Pro (all twin blade) are rated 7000 while the Mini (all single SSD blades) is rated 3600.


Unfortunately, the internet is full of armchair experts who haven’t a clue as to how any of this works.

Fortunately, if doing audio, you don’t need a very fast computer. I’m not saying that having one isn’t very nice—but I do a lot of AV where a faster computer can shave hours or even days off a project. I never want to work on something slower than my 18 core iMac Pro. At the moment, the 4TB onboard storage is at the limit and the continued offloading and onboarding of files is time consuming. I can either upgrade to 8TB for $2,800 (plus labor) or apply that money to a new Mac Studio. Since an 8TB Studio the way I want it is about $6k and I should be able to get around $5k for my iMP, upgrading the storage on the machine I own doesn’t make any sense.

BIAB 2025 Audiophile Mac
24Core/60CoreGPU M2 MacStudioUltra/8TB/192GB Sequoia, M1 MBAir, 2012 MBP
Digital Performer11, LogicPro, Finale27/Dorico/Encore/SmartScorePro64/Notion6 /Overture5