Hey everyone, I've got a Mac Studio M2 Ultra that's equipped with 4 Thunderbolt and 2 USB C 3.1 Gen 2 ports. I connected a LaCie 2Big Dock (32 TB) using the included USB-C or Thunderbolt cable directly to my computer. However, when I ran a Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, I got some pretty disappointing results: a write speed of only 23.8 MB/s and a read speed of 92.5 MB/s.
Is anyone else experiencing such low WRITE speeds? What could be causing this issue? How can I boost these speeds? And what should I ideally expect for performance?
As a side note, I've edited my post to mention that switching from an encrypted APFS volume to an unencrypted one has significantly improved my speeds to 150 MB/s write and 220 MB/s read. I plan to check with LaCie about possible hardware AES encryption options. Any advice on that would be great!
1 Answer
Have you tried plugging the dock into the back ports instead of the front ones? The back ports usually deliver better performance. I'm assuming your 2Big Dock uses hard drives, which might also contribute to the slower speeds you're seeing. According to the product page, they can reach up to 550 MB/s, so it sounds like you're not getting near that.
I did plug it into the back ports. I also found out from some research that APFS encryption can drastically slow down performance, sometimes dropping speeds from 200 MB/s to as low as 30 MB/s! I'm testing with an unencrypted volume now, but that's not ideal for me.