Thunderbolt 2, Mini Displayport, USB 3.1 Gen2? What, I just want a fast SSD damnit....

[hihihi8]

Hi Guys and Gals,

 

Straight to the point: I'm tired of the sad transfer-speeds between my mac and my PC, and I want to try something new. I have a retired Samsung 950 Pro PCI-E M.2 drive, and would like to put it in one of those M.2 external drive dongles for large-capacity fast external storage. However, I'm being bombarded by all these new serial/other data transfer technicalities and it's driving me crazy...

 

My mac is an early-2013 MacBook pro retina with 2 mini displayport-styled thunderbolt 2 ports.

My PC's motherboard is an MSi X99 board with 2 usb 3.1 Gen2 ports (1 Type-C, 1 Type-A).

 

Question 1: Can the displayport thunderbolt connectors on my mac be used for storage/data transfer from an external drive, or is it a peripheral/video-only transfer bus? I'm pretty sure it can, since I used to use an ethernet-dongle with it. Just making sure.

 

 

Question 2:

If MSi's official sources say USB 3.0s capable of 5Gbps are now called 3.1 Gen1, and ones capable of 10Gbps,

Then why does AppleInsider state differently?

AppleInsider seems to lop USB 3.1 together with Thunderbolt 3 @ 40Gbps, yet also gives it its own column @ 10Gbps. This is kinda like saying they are able to inter-communicate... which as far as I've heard, they're different (???) This directly links to the last part of the next (final) question, the sentence that is bold+underlined.

 

 

 

Finally Question: Is there a way for me to achieve thunderbolt-2-like speeds using the same 950Pro SSD on both my Mac and my PC?

Elaborated: are there enclosures such as this,

that communicate through Thunderbolt 2 instead of SATA, and would I be able to get the same speeds as Thunderbolt 2 on my PC's USB 3.1 Gen2 Ports? Or would I need something like this (Below) to do so?

 OR 

Or would USB 3.1 hinder the Thunderbolt-dedicated drive, or even make it non-compatible without a Thunderbolt card?

 

as you can likely tell from the way in which I've asked and structured this question, I am very confused at the moment, and some guidance would be very helpful!

 

Thanks in advance!

[Electronics Wizardy]

Do you need random speeds or sequentical speeds? usb3 is more than enough for a sata 3 ssd random io, and will limit it a bit with sequentical io. 

 

Really usb 3 is simple and works well.

 

The 960 won't work with most external enclosure as those are almost always sata only and thats a pcie drive.

 

You need thunderbolt to use a thunderbolt drive, you cant use thunderbolt device on a usb only type c connector.

 

 

 

Anouther way to copy files quickly is to just use 10gbe on the desktop and a thunderbolt to 10gbe adapter on the laptop

 

TLDR; usb3 is fine, get a sata ssd.