External Drives: Thunderbolt hdd vs usb 3 ssd

USB 3 and SSD. While Thunderbolt has a theoretical higher transfer speed, I don't know that you'd ever reach it even if you substituted a SSD in place of a 5400 RPM HDD. You're definitely not going to go anywhere near close to that maximum speed with that HDD. Since the drives are more likely to be the bottlenecks, the SSD is the better choice.

There are other benefits to the Thunderbolt option over the USB 3.0, if you're interested in other applications besides pure access speed. For example, you can't chain the USB device, but you can chain Thunderbolt. If you get into exotic configurations (like wanting to run Boot Camp from an external drive), Thunderbolt allows the hard drive to be recognized as if it were an internal drive and will permit that. USB can't do that. But a 5400 RPM drive... meh... you might not notice it terribly since it's not your system drive, but the SSD will be better.

 

USB 3 is fast enough for most single SATA SSD drives. Outside of synthetic benchmarks you would not really notice that speed difference anyway. You would also not notice the speed difference with a single SATA SSD in a thunderbolt enclosure versus a USB 3 enclosure.

You can think of USB 3 and Thunderbolt as the road and the drive as the car. USB 3 is like a 3 lane in each direction highway and Thunderbolt is like a 5 lane in each direction road. You can go pretty fast on either one, but you would need a really fast car to go at the maximum speed that is possible on these roads.

 

Oh, yes. Good point on the UASP. Also make sure to buy a decent brand with good reviews, especially if shopping on Amazon.

 

Yup. I have one of those as well.

 

The other reason you might want TB, is because USB 3.0 enclosures typically emit 2.4Ghz RF noise that can really mess up Bluetooth devices. Happened to me, so I ended up using a TB dock, then hooking up the USB drives to the TB dock.