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Is thunderbolt not preferred vs usb 3
  • tinbeotinbeo

    In search of thunderbolt usage and P-V members. not seeing much discussion, like we all love usb3 and satisfied getiing work done. I bought a late 2012 macbook pro but nevet use it thunderbolt port -;). It's been almost 3 year now thinking the price of thunderbolt things like hard drive, enclosure. adapter woulg go down but it is not. Hope some one would give me some advice

  • 7 Replies sorted by
  • maxdvzmaxdvz

    What is the question?

  • bmorgan83bmorgan83

    There's really a lot of variables that can go into the decision between USB 3 and Thunderbolt... and honestly price and availability are the two biggest. I LOVE thunderbolt. I have a few thunderbolt devices (in particular a blackmagic intensity extreme). But due to affordability, most of my storage is USB 3. Right now I'm mostly running 4TB Seagate Desktop Expansion drives with USB 3 because for my current business model, they're affordable and they work. I don't have a need for much faster data transfer at the moment. There may be a time where I do... and obviously as well, a RAID 5 setup would be great too... but right now the work I do would not see a great enough benefit to justify the additional cost.

  • kellar42kellar42

    I prefer thunderbolt because my iMac and my macbook support it, but I end up using USB3 for a lot of things (only my macbook supports it.) I have those modular seagate drives and a thunderbolt adapter, I put the one I am editing on on thunderbolt and backup and/or archive to USB. I also cut quick stuff on my laptop on WD Passport Ultras, on USB 3.

  • tinbeotinbeo

    @maxdvz: I look at
    http://www.amazon.com/BUFFALO-MiniStation-Thunderbolt-Portable-Drive/dp/B008D4X9UI
    also
    http://store.westerndigital.com/store/wdus/en_US/DisplayProductDetailsPage/ThemeID.21986300/categoryID.67791900/subCategory.67793300/parid.13092300/catid.55288100/My_Passport_Pro

    Read reviews and I was not impress with both brand. G drive and Lacie are still expensive. Had you used thunderbolt hdd or enclosure, please give your thought if it's worth it to spent extra cash?

  • SangyeSangye

    I use the 4TB WD Passport Pro with Thunderbolt. It's great for a very fast, spacious, bus-powered drive. Real-world R/W is around 190/190. It probably wouldn't be any faster or slower over USB 3, but it may not be able to be bus-powered if it were USB 3. Not sure on the exact power specs, but I believe Thunderbolt provides more bus power.

    Overall, USB 3 is probably better for most people. I had a specific need for a large, fast, bus-powered drive, and that's why I went with the WD Passport Pro.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    Usually USB 2.5" drives are cheaper and much more variants to select.

  • eatstoomuchjameatstoomuchjam

    Unless you're using an external SSD or large RAID setup, there will be no speed difference with a hard drive plugged into Thunderbolt vs USB 3. Data transfer rates tend not to go much about 125MB/s (1 gigabit/second) which is well below USB 3 at 5Gb/s - and that's in ideal circumstances (pure sequential transfer). If your pattern is at all random, you're not going to come anywhere near even that. A decent modern SSD, on the other hand, can easily max out 5Gb/s speeds pretty easily. Thunderbolt would be faster for that, but really, unless you're spending a lot of time waiting for huge files/directories to copy, it's not going to be worth the price difference.

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