I want to get a new 27-incher and want to buy a docking station for my bare bones hard drives. For transferring large files, lots of files, and working with video. Is thunderbolt 2 much faster than USB3?
Thanks.
If the external drives are standard HDDs (not SSD), USB3 will be fine. If the external drives are SSD and you have multiple drives, thunderbolt.
USB3 has a limit of 640MB/s so you'd need 5-6 standard HDDs on one USB3 port in order to max out.
If the external drives are standard HDDs (not SSD), USB3 will be fine. If the external drives are SSD and you have multiple drives, thunderbolt.
USB3 has a limit of 640MB/s so you'd need 5-6 standard HDDs on one USB3 port in order to max out.
I have to disagree in one point:
You can use the speed of external SSDs via USB 3 if you buy a UASP capable USB3 enclousure.
A Samsung 850 EVO SSD has read an write Speeds around 480 MB/s, so you can even use USB 3 for that.
But I agree with you, that if you use more HDs or SSDs in RAID mode, Thunderbolt would be the way to go.
But you always have to look at the specs of the Thunderbolt enclousures, because there are many out there that internally use cheap Serial-ATA Controllers, so you have no real benefit of thunderbolt at all.
the drives I am using are standard HDDs, almost of which are 7200rpm some are 5400rpm and I usually have at most 2 external drives connected at a time.
1. so if I understand correctly, if using one drive at a time USB3 vs. TB2 will be similar in speed, though if I am connecting 5-6 drives to use at the same time it will bottleneck my USB3 abilities and this is where TB2 has an advantage?
2. Is there any benefit to going with a thunderbolt enclosure/hard drive docking station for one or two external drives vs. just USB3?
Thanks.