Thunderbolt 3 HDD or USB-C SSD

[DamienHerrington0912]

I am adding an external storage unit to my rig and got stuck at price point or speed. 

 

Using 1 of my thunderbolt 3 ports; My purpose is to have and external storage with individual partitions for firstly- my FCPX libraries & files( 2tb), second- bulk personal files (including adobe Ai and LPX (1tb), third- time machine back ups (2tb). Thought I could go with leaving AI and LPX on the internal 1tb ssd if getting a 6tb external was too much. 

however the configuration of the drive, My question to you all is this,

 

from a thunderbolt 3 port which is faster is this case of read speeds, A) thunderbolt 3 HDD @ 7200rpm or B) USB-C SSD (not Thunderbolt 3)

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

A usbc ssd will be much faster than any hdd. A hdd is limited to about 200mB/s max today, and the ssd could easily be 4x faster sequentially, and 100x faster or more with random io.

 

 

[A.Hruskach]

Note that USB C is just a connector! A USB C port can run even at USB 2.0 spec. Check the rated speed of the port. But most USB C ports are 3.0, very rarely they are slower.

 

also, if a HDD is thunderbolt 3, it is most commonly a RAID setup. So see how many individual drives make up that one thunderbolt 3 HDD. It is like that because one HDD wouldnt need that kind of speed that thunderbolt 3 provides, but multiple HDD’s in raid would easily use that extra speed.