How to connect 3.5 in external hard drives to an Apple Mac Studio Ultra M1, Model Mac 13, 2, 2022?

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Epli_2022 Author

Level 1

4 points

How to connect 3.5 in external hard drives to an Apple Mac Studio Ultra M1, Model Mac 13, 2, 2022?

How to connect external hard drives to an Apple Mac Studio Ultra M1, Model Mac 13,2, 2022. Apple labels its many ports on the Studio “Thunderbolt/USB4 up to 40 Gb/s x1,” an update version of USB-C. Monterey OS to lots of external 3.5 inch hard drives? Many are Hitachi/HGST drives labeled 5V 450mA.12V 850mA DC ….SATA 6Gb/s…RPM 7200. This one is Jan 2013. Others have similar but not identical HDDs power ratings. Others are Western Digital, Seagate, etc.

I have been using an Anker USB3 adapter for Sata HDDs, but Anker doesn’t sell one for USB-C or USB4. The Anker Sata adapter I have connected via a Anker HUB which connects to the Studio USB4 ports. I want to use the higher speed ports on the Studio.

What is a specific device I can buy and use? Few are listed on the web for 3.5” HDDs, but I bought two which I don't want to use until I can find others have used this for many times successfully. I can find no independent tests or comparisons of these or other adapters. I have two now sold by Amazon, detail in image below:

Aoko AE10SL usb3.2 Gen2 Adapter to sata

ZEXMTE X001VV15VD

Both Aoko and ZEXMTE adapters come with power converters made for US type 120 volt power plugs with separate cables that connect to the adapters.

Apple does not list any supported “accessories” like these and AppleCare Tech don't know what is safe. To be sure I am using the older USB3 Anker until I can find someone who has tested or used anything faster. I can’t find anything on the web testing these as it is so new.

Help please!

Mac Studio

Posted on Aug 10, 2022 03:53 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

den.thed

Level 10

88,786 points

Aug 10, 2022 05:31 PM in response to Epli_2022

The Mac Studio has 2 USB-A ports that are plenty fast enough for 3.5” 7200rpm SATA drives including 2.5” SATA SSD drives. Personally I would just keep using the old USB3 Anker.

Mac Studio - Technical Specifications - Apple

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Answer 2

Aug 10, 2022 05:36 PM in response to Epli_2022

Rotating magnetic drives at up to 7200 RPM can source an initial burst of data off the platters at up to 150 Mbytes/sec. But once that initial burst is finished and the drive has to take a 12 millisecond break to do a new seek, they settle in to a large-block transfer rate closer to 50 GBytes/sec. Random reads & writes are far slower.

6 Gbits/sec (if there were no additional overhead) would be around 750 MBytes/sec. That is a a description of a very large PIPE attached to a drive that can not possibly fill that pipe, because data has to spin under the read/write head, and then the drive takes a huge break to seek to a new track.

USB-2 will do 48 GBytes/sec, so anything faster will work fine. USB-2 will barely clip your data.

A larger PIPE will not produce faster data rates. Do not spend a moment looking for anything faster. USB-3 has lots of spare capacity, and when you think about it, USB-2 is fast enough for most Rotating magnetic drives.

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Only when you start to connect some really fast SSD drives do you need to be concerned about ThunderBolt speeds. There, drive speeds above about 2500 Mbytes/sec start to get clipped by limits of ThunderBolt speeds and overhead.

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Answer 3

Epli_2022 Author

Level 1

4 points

Sep 12, 2022 06:42 PM in response to Epli_2022

Are there not important differences in estimating speed for an external hard drive contingent on different uses?

If we’re simply copying from a hard drive to or from a computer that is different with other activities and other factors?

How much space is on the external as well as the local computer drive?

The active memory on the computer most of all, but also on the hard drives some of which have different ways of using space available for reading in advance add connecting the content from and to currently being read items.

Apple regularly automatically indexes many items but even this may well shift with new procedures with the M1 and M2 programming by Apple. MS Windows traditionally did not index but later added in different ways and options to choose from.

If I am just using an external drive to do a quick search for one small item, to see if a file name or a word in the document is found on the hard drive, in years past it was very slow. But with larger memory size and indexing and special programming tricks, it can be very very fast. Especially when if you have two or three hard drives simultaneously connected, and one is searching for a series of documents which is included on one of them but you’re not sure which drive is on.

Programs like Time Machine and Super Duper are not just copying but also reading in advance a previous job for cumulative addition or changes.

I have personally experienced big differences even if these are with roughly the same speed of external mechanical hard drives about 7000 RPM.

The higher speeds of the Mac Studio combine with these other things, including a sata adapter. Might some of these things likely to make a speed difference between USB2 3 or 4 even with a 7000 RPM external hard drive?

Any tricks to somehow assist in doing these kinds of jobs would be welcome. Such as including a search which could also be cloud sites like iCloud Dropbox or OneDrive where I would like to search when an item may be on three simultaneously connected external hard drives. Yet there may be on 20 more external hard drive all of which are not simultaneously connected.

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Answer 4

Sep 12, 2022 07:01 PM in response to Epli_2022

Epli_2022 wrote:

Are there not important differences in estimating speed for an external hard drive contingent on different uses?

If we’re simply copying from a hard drive to or from a computer that is different with other activities and other factors?

Copying files reads the block as fast as possible. Any other use could be LESS demanding.

The top speed that ANY one drive can transfer data using ThunderBolt is about 2500 M Bytes/sec. Connect a faster drive or group of drives to a ThunderBolt "PIPE" and the size of the 'pipe' dictates the top speed.

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Answer 5

Sep 12, 2022 07:08 PM in response to Epli_2022

<< Apple regularly automatically indexes many items >>

No, it does not.

It computes an Index ONCE, or when you request it be done again. Then as files are created, the index data for the new files are added to the already-built index.

each drive has a pre-built index, and that is why your search is very fast.

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Time machine does not read ahead.

It consults a MacOS data structure, the File System Event Store, which lists recently changed folders.

OneDrive does not do that, and it punishes performance of your computer to run third-party file storage like OneDrive, that were not re-written for Mac but merely ported over from some other Operating System.

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How to connect 3.5 in external hard drives to an Apple Mac Studio Ultra M1, Model Mac 13, 2, 2022?

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