Question about Thunderbolt 3

[rendeRX]

Hello LTT forums,

 

So I'm looking for a new laptop with Thunderbolt 3 connection because I'll be using an external hard drive. I did some findings and I found a good laptop with the specs to suit my needs. However, in order to utilize the Thunderbolt 3 speeds, does the external hard drive need to have a Thunderbolt 3 port? Also, what about the cable?

 

Thanks.

[Mira Yurizaki]

You need the device to have a Thunderbolt port and use the appropriate cable to use the Thunderbolt interface.

 

However, most hard drives can't even come close to capping USB 3.0, so I wouldn't suggest getting a Thunderbolt external drive unless you need it for its daisy chaining feature and you have a ton of drives

[TheGlenlivet]

USB3.1 gen2 is good, even for SSDs.  Same connector as TB3.

I have a TB3 Motherboard and, as pointed out above, wait for HDDs when transferring data with it.

[Senzelian]

As Yurizaki said, TB3 for an external drive seems a bit pointless, as USB 3.0 would do just fine.

 

If you're using an external TB3 display or an external GPU, then TB3 can come in handy.

[rendeRX]

Thanks for the great responses. 

 

So if I want the fastest speeds for an external HDD, TB3 is overkill and USB 3.0 is the best?

 

Thanks once again.

[Mira Yurizaki]

27 minutes ago, rendeRX said:

Thanks for the great responses. 

 

So if I want the fastest speeds for an external HDD, TB3 is overkill and USB 3.0 is the best?

 

Thanks once again.

Yes. To put in perspective, USB 3.0 can provide about 400 MB/sec after overhead of bandwidth. The fastest hard drive I've seen for sustained transfer rate is about 250 MB/sec on a 12TB drive. This reduces as capacities get smaller, but I've seen my 6TB drive sustain about 180MB/sec. Note that this is for an ideal transfer: i.e., one large file. If you're transferring a lot of files of smaller size, transfer performance starts to really suffer.