I haven’t attempted it yet, but I have my display connected through the dock while the SSD enclosure is directly linked to my Mac for ease of access. From your original post, it wasn’t clear that the SSD enclosure was not connected to the dock. If you intend to connect the SSD to the dock when you upgrade to the M4 Pro Mac mini, you should consider the following question: Does the write speed decrease significantly when the SSD is connected to the dock along with the display? If the performance remains stable, switching to a new dock may not yield significant improvements.
The write speed of 1500 MB/s equates to approximately 12 Gbps. In contrast, a high-performing NVMe drive connected via Thunderbolt 3 can reach speeds around 22 Gbps. It’s possible that the controller in your SSD enclosure is limiting your NVMe speeds. Additionally, it would be worthwhile to check the specifications of your NVMe to understand its expected performance when not connected via Thunderbolt.
A typical Thunderbolt 3 dock can manage a maximum of around 25 Gbps for regular data transfer since Thunderbolt 3 supports 40 Gbps total bandwidth excluding display data. The bandwidth allocation for video resolutions varies: a 4K60 display uses about 16 Gbps, a 5K60 display around 28 Gbps, and a 6K60 display with Display Stream Compression (DSC) consumes about 15.4 Gbps. In contrast, the CalDigit TS3+ dock features a 1 Gbps PCIe Ethernet controller and USB ports that share bandwidth. In a Thunderbolt 5 dock, USB devices typically connect to the USB 3.1 gen 2 controller with a bandwidth of 9.7 Gbps.
This arrangement means all connected USB devices would share that bandwidth. Furthermore, Thunderbolt 5 docks may also integrate PCIe lanes, allowing for faster connections to NVMe devices or PCIe Ethernet adapters.
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