question about usb cables

[mrgreeneyes]

I have an Asus external Blu Ray burner, that has a Y usb cable ( Micro usb to connect to back on burner, and two usb A to plug into computer)
my issue is I have a MacBook Air that only has Usb C, and I have an anker, dock that gives me regular USB ports. but its seems slow to transfer data off the disc. can I just swap out the y cable for a micro usb to type C?

 

[Fishrrman]

You can try the "cable swap", but realize in advance that it might not work.

The reason for the Y-cable is that the drive may need more power than a single USB port can provide.

The Anker dock that you have... is it powered?
By that, I mean does it have its own power supply block?

 

[mrgreeneyes]

You can try the "cable swap", but realize in advance that it might not work.

The reason for the Y-cable is that the drive may need more power than a single USB port can provide.

The Anker dock that you have... is it powered?
By that, I mean does it have its own power supply block?

This is the anker dock i have

Anker USB C Hub for MacBook, 7-in-2 USB C to C Adapter, Compatible with Thunderbolt 3 Port, 100W Power Delivery, 4K HDMI, USBC& 2 USB-A Data Ports, SD and microSD Card Reader

Anker 7-in-2 USB C Hub with 4K HDMI Power Delivery SD/microSD Card Reader and 2 USB 3 0 Ports

www.amazon.com

 

[coolajami]

I have an Asus external Blu Ray burner, that has a Y usb cable ( Micro usb to connect to back on burner, and two usb A to plug into computer)
my issue is I have a MacBook Air that only has Usb C, and I have an anker, dock that gives me regular USB ports. but its seems slow to transfer data off the disc. can I just swap out the y cable for a micro usb to type C?

Regarding power, if you swap the Y usb cable for a micro-usb to USB-C type, that should provide enough power for your Blu-Ray Burner. The Blu-Ray burner supplied with a y-usb cables because most likely when was made, only USB-A (2.0) ports were around, and it would have need more power than the 0.5A of power that a single USB-A (2.0) could have provided. the micro-USB cable could pass up to 1A power and a device can draw up to 3A from a USB-C port. So if you change your Y-cable for a micro-USB to USB-C cable, that should provide enough power for your burner. Just make sure you get a good quality USB-C data cable, because the bad quality one's are not very forgiving.

Regarding the transfer speed, the micro-USB connection has a transfer speed up to a maximum of 480MB. I think the Anker USB-C hubs can support a transfer speed up to 5GB so, put it simple, the bottleneck here is your Burner.If you're using the hub for connecting other drives the same time, that will affect the speed because they're sharing the 5Gb bandwidth of the same USB-C port. Especially in the case that someone's trying to burn a CD with the data coming from an external HDD(especially the spinning type HDDs) and both devices are connected in the same usb-c hub, the speed would be abysmal.

In order to maximise your speed you need to connect the burner directly to the laptop, and also do the same for any external HDD you may want to burn data from. This may not be very convenient on a MacBook Air as it has only 2 usb-c ports, so the best alternative is to use a true TB3 hub (not a simple USB-C) that is external powered, like the Caldigit Element, TS3+ etc.