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M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

eclecticlight.co

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Re: M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

#261

Post by cestith »

Terretta wrote: post #259
cestith wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think a 15 year old Dell is going to match the performance of any new machine? "Old" is not the same thing as "low end".

> Do you think a 15 year old Dell is going to match the performance of any new machine? Well, yes? We aren't that much faster since 2010 if you had true top end then and true low end now. But since talking Macs and Chromebooks, let pull up those: - Geekbench MacBook Pro 2010 15": 2.66GHz Intel Core i7 (i7-620M): 457 single, 972 multi - https://www.ebay.com/itm/304426589491?hash=item46e13d1d33:g:... And a currently sh…

And the M1 Mac Mini gets... guess what? 1744 single core and 7732 multi core.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=m1+Mac+mini

The Air gets 1744 and 7711.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q...

So no, by your own ranting the M1 mini is not a low-end desktop easily matched by free 15-year-old hardware.

Re: M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

#262

Post by yencabulator »

reaperducer wrote: post #104
gumby wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Allowing marketers to take over everything was such a terrible mistake. I think the USB naming is the result of not using marketers.

I think the USB naming is the result of not using marketers. This seems closer to the truth to me. Being better at naming things is part of the reason that Apple became so successful. "What do you want for your birthday, little Timmy? Do you want Apple AirPods, or Sony WF1000XM4s?"

AirPods, Pro, Gen 1, 2 or 3? iPad, Air, Mini, or Pro, which generation? And for used ones, where does it say on those products which model it is?

Apple also sucks at naming and labeling things.

Re: M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

#263

Post by Dylan16807 »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #247
cestith wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you just compare the $700 Mini to a $140 ECS Liva or some $200 HP or Asus Chromebox?

If you think either of those computers holds a candle to an M1 Mac mini I don’t know what to tell you.

I don't think you have to hold a candle to the M1 Mac mini to qualify as a low end desktop.

Re: M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

#264

Post by amelius »

paulmd wrote: post #237
amelius wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't any filesystem that runs on top of a SSD or flash drive at risk from the SSD/flash drive controller corrupting the disk or making it inaccessible, when the volume is not cleanly unmounted? I can remember losing a USB drive that way, even though it was using a journaling filesystem.

Potentially yes, realistically no. This is the old "if the storage controller is lying about flushing to disk, there's not a lot you can do about it" problem. ZFS does have defensive mechanisms, like doing a read after write to try and be sure that what is written is actually committed to disk, but if the storage controller chooses to serve that out of cache then that could be a lie too. It's the old "trusting trust"…

The question remains: how did I lose an entire ext4 volume after pulling the USB drive from the machine without unmounting it.

Is anyone testing for these kinds of things?

Re: M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

#265

Post by gumby »

yencabulator wrote: post #262
reaperducer wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the USB naming is the result of not using marketers. This seems closer to the truth to me. Being better at naming things is part of the reason that Apple became so successful. "What do you want for your birthday, little Timmy? Do you want Apple AirPods, or Sony WF1000XM4s?"

AirPods, Pro, Gen 1, 2 or 3? iPad, Air, Mini, or Pro, which generation? And for used ones, where does it say on those products which model it is? Apple also sucks at naming and labeling things.

TBH those names are the good ones.

Which Macbook Air do you have? Today, sure, you can say "M1". But earlier models did not have official names requiring Apple themselves to describe them in documentation as something like "MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2017, Two Thunderbolt 3 ports)"* or worse, resort to the internal part number ("MPXQ2xx/A, MPXR2xx/A, MPXT2xx/A, MPXU2xx/A" in that case).

Not that "Sony WF1000XM4s" is anything to write home about either.

Re: M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

#266

Post by amelius »

amelius wrote: post #92
RedShift1 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure it's a USB problem and not something else? Did you reduce all possible variables - ie how scientific were you in determining USB was the problem and not something else?

I think I tested quite thoroughly on very recent Linux versions with Rsync. Of course it is difficult to pinpoint the real culprit with certainty, but USB has no error correction, and that makes it the prime suspect here.

Another bad thing about it is that there is no good way to debug it (afaik).

Re: M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

#267

Post by [deleted] »

paulmd wrote: post #232
madeofpalk wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC Thunderbolt essentially is "PCIE but in a cable"

Thunderbolt actually includes a lot of other stuff that isn't just "pcie" in a cable - like USB and DisplayPort streams in addition (at the same time) to the PCIe links. There is also U.2 for shorter links. There are relatively trivial risers (not sure if it needs a chip or not, but either way they're under $30) that let you turn regular PCIe x4 or M.2 x4 slots into U.2 cables. It's intended for the enterprise space…

[deleted]

Re: M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

#268

Post by Dylan16807 »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #210
spankalee wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every backwards compatible spec would have this "problem". Either a new version of a spec says that all existing implementations are out of spec, or it add new optional features and existing implementations are that don't support them are still in spec. There's really no other option.

This is not an explanation of why the naming is a disaster. USB 1 devices work on USB 2 devices without there needing to be some insane renaming. Ditto USB 2 devices on USB 3 devices. This naming was an entirely unforced error, and should be called out as such at every opportunity to keep it from happening again. Edit: if you want another example of a spec with good names, checkout WiFi 6. They realized that no norma…

> Edit: if you want another example of a spec with good names, checkout WiFi 6. They realized that no normal person could reason about whether 11n or 11ac was better, so they changed the naming scheme to make it obvious what was going on.

Moving to WiFi 6 was a great idea!

Which they immediately made a mess of.

What version of WiFi has 6GHz support? 6e of course.

How about uplink MU-MIMO? Oh that's WiFi 6 Wave 2.

Re: M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

#269

Post by Dylan16807 »

notatoad wrote: post #113
grishka wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> USB 3.1 Gen 1 is the straight rebranding of USB 3.0 Why? To solve what exactly? In a sane world, it'd be major.minor, with nothing appended at the end. Allowing marketers to take over everything was such a terrible mistake. At this point I myself just don't differentiate USB versions beyond 3.0. 2.0 is the slow one, 3.0 is the fast one, anything newer is "so fast I won't ever saturate this much bandwidth anyway". T…

IIRC, USB 3.1 was an update to the spec to allow USB Type C connectors. USB 3.0 specified the old type-a connector on one end and one of the weird oversized type-b connectors on the other end. Maybe not relevant as a consumer to have a difference in the spec version for that, but if you’re a manufacturer trying to implement it, it’s worth a bump to the minor version number.

3.1 came out a year before C.

Re: M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2

#270

Post by Dylan16807 »

notatoad wrote: post #257
grishka wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some Android phones that have a USB-C port but only support 2.0 speeds (as per the macOS system info USB tree thing). Which version is that then? I've always assumed that the physical layer of the protocol and the connectors themselves were separate specs and you could have USB protocol running over any kind of arbitrarily shaped connector. And no protocol over a USB(-A) connector, because those are de-facto l…

I think that version is called "we don't give a fuck about what the USB-IF thinks"

I'm pretty sure 2.0 C cables are entirely legal by the standard.

Unlike charge-only cables...

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