How come the difference is so huge? And are there any faster alternatives?
In: Technology
It sounds like the MacBook has an M.2 drive. Basically, the memory chips aren’t significantly faster, but the interface is. M.2 drives plug directly into the motherboard, so there is significantly greater bandwidth than USB 3 or even SATA, which connect via cables. PCIe drives can be even faster, but typically, you don’t see those on laptops. I wouldn’t worry about it too much though, as despite the huge difference in numbers, the practical difference isn’t super noticeable in daily use.
Due to the connection type you can achieve huge differences. Most external SSD use SATA, like HDDs, and only achieve around 500-600 MB/s. However, with M.2 drivers NVM can get a lot faster, as high as 3200 MB/s, like most premium computers nowadays, for instance your MacBook pro and dell xps.
The t5 uses a SATA (3) SSD internally, which sets a cap at the transfer speed between the ssd and the chip between your computer and the ssd at a maximum of 600 megabytes per second (minus protocol overhead, etc).
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