I don't understand why the need for T3 connection on external HD with spinning platter drives (not SSD). The speed bottleneck is with the spinning platers. USB3.0 is plenty fast for these drives. Even SSD doesn't have the speed that remotely reach T2 let alone T3. The same drive can be had for much cheaper with USB 3.0 ports. Paying a premium today for a T3 connection seems silly to me. Please correct me if I am wrong.
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Thunderbolt 3 external hard drives doesn't make sense...
- Thread starter HiFiGuy528
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It makes sense to me for daisy chaining multiple drives and monitors together. Like you said though, doesn't make any sense for speed as it will still be limited to the drive speed which is much lower than the interface.
One thing that TB3 guarantees is 15W of power, so it's possible for a mfg'er to offer a bus powered 3.5" drive.
Correct on other point: spinning drive won't utilize the bandwidth.
An array of spinning disks might use the additional drives if configured for RAID, as would an array of SSDs.
One other advantage might be the fact that TB3 ports also include a USB 3.1 gen2 interface, so a USB drive will work as well.
Correct on other point: spinning drive won't utilize the bandwidth.
An array of spinning disks might use the additional drives if configured for RAID, as would an array of SSDs.
One other advantage might be the fact that TB3 ports also include a USB 3.1 gen2 interface, so a USB drive will work as well.
Another issue with USB externals is they will go to sleep after a period of inactivity. USB also places a load on your CPU. I've been running an Areca external drive bay @ TB2, with a few HGST premium platter drives in it. TB allows the full speed of the drives (150-180 Mbps), and they are always on with no load on the CPU. Perfect for an iTunes library and lots of data, keeping my internal SSD lean and clean. (I use like <50GB of my 500GB internal SSD). I do also use USB 3.0 externals, for occasional backups (once a week, or once a month for off-site).