I mentioned FireWire earlier, and here’s a photo of my FireWire cables. Thunderbolt 3 is the next generation of that same technology, taking the speeds up to 40Gbps – meaning it would only take 1 minute and 47 seconds to transfer that same 500GB file.Īnd just like its predecessor, Thunderbolt 3 is daisy-chainable, can power external devices, can be used as a display cable and a data cable at the same time, and can be used to add more peripherals to your computer with a dock. Video editors will know what I’m talking about here, as the limited number of ports available to use can limit what additional resources we need to have plugged into our computers. Both hard drives would then be connected to your computer, only taking up a single port on the back of your machine. This meant you could connect one hard drive to your computer with one cable and then connect another hard drive to that first hard drive with another Thunderbolt cable.
Here’s where Thunderbolt was most exciting – you could daisy-chain devices. But you could also use it to expand the ports on your computer with up to six peripherals, including USB and FireWire.īut more than that, Thunderbolt 2 also doubled as a display cable known as Mini DisplayPort, meaning it would allow you to connect more monitors to your computer with this cable, something USB cannot do. With marketed speeds of 20Gbps (meaning it would only take 3.5 minutes to transfer that same 500GB file), it was nearly four times faster than standard USB 3.0 cables. You might recognize the Thunderbolt 2 cable here:īack when Thunderbolt 2 was announced, it was very exciting. Thunderbolt is a type of cable that has gone through many iterations. 5 minutes.īut if you are looking for the next generation of speed, look no further than… USB-C speeds are fast no matter what, and if you aren’t transferring huge amounts of data (we’re talking terabytes upon terabytes), you likely won’t know the difference between transfer times that take 3 minutes vs. However, most of these specifications won’t matter for the average user so long as you can plug in your USB-C cable to your computer and your external device and get it working.Īs someone who is regularly concerned about transfer times of large files, I have my cables and hard drives very organized and labeled and take great care to make sure I’m using the right cable. Not all USB-C cables are alike, and different cables can provide different speeds. USB-C is a type of connection, but it can mean that any number of underlying connections are being used on that cable, whether that’s USB 3.2 Gen 1 or USB 3.2 Gen 2×2. One thing to note here is that USB, in general, is a complicated connection. Again, this is entirely dependent on many factors with your hard drives and computer. Using my file transfer calculator, it would only take 7 minutes and 9 seconds to transfer that same 500GB file. This cable boasts a speed marketed as 10Gbps, meaning that it’s technically twice as fast as your older USB 3.0 cables. You just plug it in, and it works! Big step up from those clumsy older USB cables. This newer USB protocol has several technical benefits and one major benefit – there is no top or bottom. While USB 3.0 is great and will continue to be around for a long time to come, it has since been replaced with a newer USB protocol. I’m either provided with hard drives with that protocol on them, or I am constantly going back to older hard drives to source data from them that use that protocol. The typical shuttle drives that are easily purchasable at any electronics store typically do not require an additional external power source.Īs a video editor, I still use USB 3.0 quite often. It can also send power to devices, such as an external hard drive. However, that can vary based on a myriad of factors like hard drive speed and what else is being transferred. This means you can transfer a 500 gigabyte (GB) file in roughly 14 minutes. USB 3.0 is typically marketed as having roughly 5 Gbps of speed. Things such as mobile devices for data transfer, webcams, hard drives, external USB sticks, and some extension interfaces for adding more ports to your computer. USB is a data transfer protocol used to connect many different types of devices.
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