
- Best thunderbolt 2 external hard drive for mac for mac#
- Best thunderbolt 2 external hard drive for mac portable#
- Best thunderbolt 2 external hard drive for mac pro#
Typical high performing 2.5″ Hard Disk transfer rate or throughput (read or write) is between 100MB/s to 130MB/s. High performing Solid State Drives can achieve between 340MB/s to 440MB/s, more than 3 times the throughput of conventional disk drives. The difference in performance is huge and with that the cost per Gigabyte.
Best thunderbolt 2 external hard drive for mac portable#
These portable hard drives can be based on either the conventional 2.5″ Hard Disk Drive with mechanical read head and spinning disks or Solid State Drive where NAND flash memory chips are used. While the transfer rate for Thunderbolt is 10 Gb/s and USB 3.0 is 5 Gb/s, the real performance of the device, apart from external factors such as operating system, software configuration and capacity is the hardware itself. 2.5″ Hard Disk Drive vs Solid State Drive This means, it is 4 times faster than the USB 3.0 and 20 times faster than USB 2.0 with a whole load of bandwidth to support high performance external disks, video capture device, external display and PCI Express cards using a Thunderbolt chassis for hardware expansion (Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel network, USB and Firewire peripherals). Unless specified, it is safe to assume that most portable hard drives are based on the first generation Thunderbolt. Now, the next generation Thunderbolt 2 which is already on the Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, Mac mini and iMac with 5K display has twice the speed of the original Thunderbolt I/O bringing it up to 20 Gbps, using two 10Gbps channels. Transferring high definition movies and other large files now can take seconds versus minutes when compared with older interface technologies. While USB 3.0 is fast, at 5GBps (640MBps) which is 10 times faster than the USB 2.0 it replaces, it is still slow compared to the Thunderbolt connection.Īt 10 Gbps, Thunderbolt technology is up to 20x faster than USB 2.0 and up to 12x faster than FireWire 800. Thunderbolt is twice as fast as USB 3.0, there I said it.

Let’s look at the technologies powering the portable thunderbolt hard drives in the market today.
Best thunderbolt 2 external hard drive for mac pro#
Best thunderbolt 2 external hard drive for mac for mac#


