Help on external storage, TB3 vs. USB 3, etc.

[Keith Rondinelli]

Hello all. I am upgrading to a new 2019 Mac Pro from a 2013 trashcan model. I'm looking for fast, reliable external storage and backup for my work—photography, motion graphics, some video editing. On my current setup, I've been using two Western Digital My Book Duo Thunderbolt 2 enclosures, one where work is stored, and another daisy-chained to it for Time Machine backups (I also keep a cloud backup of critical files via Backblaze).

This setup has worked really well for me.

In upgrading, I'd like a similar setup, but I'm confused as to Thunderbolt 3 vs. USB 3/3.1. Can I connect USB 3 drives to the Thunderbolt 3 ports on the 2019 Mac Pro? Is there a speed gain if using Thunderbolt 3 drives vs. USB 3 drives? The new Western Digital My Book Duo models, which use USB 3 claim a transfer rate of 5Gb/sec in Raid 0 mode. Is the transfer capacity of Thunderbolt 3 only really taken advantage of when using SSDs?

Hopefully this question makes sense. I know that a connection type is only as fast as the drive it's connecting, and the USB 3 options are more affordable.

Thanks.

 

[Stephen.R]

Yes usb3 devices can be connected to tb3 ports, as can your existing tb2 devices.

for usb3 devices if they don’t include a USB cable with USB-c at the host (computer) end you can either buy a type-c to type-a adapter, or buy a usb-c to USB-whatever cable (where whatever is the type of USB port on the device: b, mini, micro, 3.0 b, etc).

for tb2 devices you essentially need to buy apples tb3 to tb2 adapter. no one else makes one, that I’m aware of.

Re: speed, assuming the drives are mechanical (ie not ssd) maybe in a raid0 they’re a little bottlenecked but I don’t know that it would be much. If speed is your concern (ie for a daily work drive) I’d opt for an SSD. Even a plain SATA SSD via usb3 will feel a lot faster to use than mechanical drives.

as you’re using a Mac Pro you also have the option to buy a PCIe M2 or U2 card and mount very fast SSDs directly inside the case.

For backups I’d recommend the biggest reliable-brand mechanical drive you can afford/justify for the purpose. If you want more redundancy, get/configure a raid1 of mechanical drives for your local backups.

 

[Keith Rondinelli]

Thanks Stephen. Unfortunately SSDs seem out of the question in terms of size and price. Often I can't seen to find one that's more than 2TB, and I generally need more room than that. My current setup's drives are 6TB and I'm maxing them out.

Is it worth upgrading to mechanical USB-c drives, or should I just plug my current Thunderbolt 2 drives into the new mac via an adaptor?

 

[Stephen.R]

Mechanical drives haven’t really got any faster lately just bigger.
TB2 still has twice or quadruple the bandwidth capacity most USB-c devices have so absolutely they can still be used.

I guess it depends how much speed matters for you. You could combine multiple SSDs (either SATA or m2) but obviously they’re more expensive per GB.

 

[Juicy Box]

I would just stick with the TB2 drives.

Other than not having to buy a pricey Apple TB3>TB2 cable, I don't see any really benefit to using USB-c over TB2.

If you ever decide to get SSDs, you could probably get some type of RAID0, either HW or SW to combine them. I will still go with TB2 or TB3 over USB because TRIM can be enabled under TB, but not USB.