External hard drives speeds

Ok, they are drives in a hub under my Mac, but they are classed as external to the Mac as they are connected via USB-C 3.1
I always thought drives read faster than they wrote, but in this instant, both the SSD and the NVMe drive has a faster write speed than read according to Black magic speed test, I also tried AmorphousDiskMark and it comes out the same, it is only about 30 odd MB/s difference, but as I said I always thought right was faster than read. Even the main mac drive is faster on write than read,

Don't want to test that too often, as it wears out the drive.

I should have a got a thunderbolt dock, but the prices are still pretty high, the NVMe drive I got yesterday, it is a Crucial P 3 4TB, gen 3 with a 3,000MB/s top speed, it will never reach anything near that in a USB hub, but it was a good price. Maybe one day if finances allow me i will get a thunderbolt hub and stick the drive in that, but at the moment it is fast enough for what I need it for according to black magic speed app.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I always thought drives read faster than they wrote, but in this instant, both the SSD and the NVMe drive has a faster write speed than read according to Black magic speed test, I also tried AmorphousDiskMark and it comes out the same, it is only about 30 odd MB/s difference, but as I said I always thought right was faster than read. Even the main mac drive is faster on write than read

Write-behind caching? Just a guess.

No ideas why it should be, but it seems to be that on Apple silicon Macs the disk write speeds are greater than the read speeds. It is (as you would expect) the other way round on my Intel Mac. And, for some reason, M2 Macs are slower than M1 Macs when accessing external drives (with newer Intel Macs being faster than both).

Thunderbolt drives and accessories are expensive, USB 3.1 (using either A or C connector) is very good. USB 3.0 is slower. Thunderbolt drives are fastest as they are directly PCIe attached, so if utter performance (data rate, or IOPS) is your concern, e.g. insanely large video files, or thousands of small files (in software development) etc.

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

No ideas why it should be, but it seems to be that on Apple silicon Macs the disk write speeds are greater than the read speeds. It is (as you would expect) the other way round on my Intel Mac. And, for some reason, M2 Macs are slower than M1 Macs when accessing external drives (with newer Intel Macs being faster than both).

Very strange, will according to the blurb for the dock non M1 speeds are faster than M1, but I don't know what that means for M2. It is fine it does what I need, the only thing it will not cope with according to black magic speed test is black magic raw and ProRes 422 over 8K, and the read is too slow for 4320p50 ProRes 422. Since I am never going to use ProRes or black magic raw, then it is not a problem.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Thunderbolt drives and accessories are expensive, USB 3.1 (using either A or C connector) is very good. USB 3.0 is slower. Thunderbolt drives are fastest as they are directly PCIe attached, so if utter performance (data rate, or IOPS) is your concern, e.g. insanely large video files, or thousands of small files (in software development) etc.

I did look at thunderbolt before I got the dock I have, but price put me off, after all the one I got cost over £100 and on top of buying the mac.
As I have said above in the post to TinyMongomery, the drives will do what I need, I will use the NVMe drive for video as it is faster than the SSD, also it is larger. The SSD can be used for documents and maybe photos as they don't need the speed and still fast enough.

Thanks peeps for the replies.

Apple prores can produce rather large files as well

I use H.264 at the moment to render, my two main cameras use H.264, while rendering in H.265 would save space, I will stay with H.264 until H.265 becomes more wide spread. also H.264 is not so taxing on the computer.

I have no need for prores

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I use H.264 at the moment to render, my two main cameras use H.264, while rendering in H.265 would save space, I will stay with H.264 until H.265 becomes more wide spread. also H.264 is not so taxing on the computer.

I have no need for prores

AV1 will take over from h.265. But you are quite right, your workflow doesn't need it. With Davinci resolve i need prores even less than with prem pro.