USB 2 VS USB 3 SPEEDS PRO

The maximum speed of Thunderbolt 3 and 4 is exactly the same but Thunderbolt 4 offers slightly more flexibility and power when connecting multiple monitors to a Mac.įor example Thunderbolt 3 is only required to support one external 4K monitor whereas Thunderbolt 4 has to support at least two 4K displays or one 8K display.

USB 2 VS USB 3 SPEEDS PRO

Since around 2107, all new Macs have a Thunderbolt 3 port and the latest M1 MacBook Pro and Mac Studio have Thunderbolt 4 ports. The fastest Thunderbolt external hard drives will deliver read speeds of around 2800MB/s and 2400MB/s write speed such as those achieved by the Samsung X5. Thunderbolt can support speeds of up to 40Gb/s (5000MB/s) which only USB 4.0 can compare with (more on this later) although you won’t find any external hard drives or monitors that can utilize all of this capacity due to physical performance limitations of the drives. Thunderbolt is a technology first developed between Apple and Intel back in 2011 which supports incredibly high data transfer speeds via a Thunderbolt port and a Thunderbolt cable. However, Mac users will get less than half these speeds with USB 3.2 2×2 connections as we’re about to explain. So the SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD drive for example claims to offer transfer speeds of 2000MB/s via a USB-C standard known as USB 3.2 2×2 which equals 16Gb/s. Most external drives advertise their maximum data transfer speeds in Megabits per second (MB/s).Įxternal drives have both a read speed (the time it takes to read data) and a write speed (the time it takes to write the data on the disk) which are usually similar but write speeds are often a bit slower. So 1 Gigabyte (GB) = 1000 Megabit (MB) = 8 Gigabits (Gb). Here we try to explain why this is happening so you can make a better choice when buying and external hard drive or external display for your Mac.įirstly, it’s important to understand the difference between Bytes and Bits which is how data transfer speeds are measured. This confusion has led to particular disappointment among Apple Silicon M1 Mac users who, even with the M1 Pro, M1 Max and M1 Ultra chips, have bought external hard drives promising incredibly fast data transfer speeds only to achieve less than half of what they claim to be capable of in reality. While Thunderbolt is relatively easy to understand because it was custom designed for Apple devices, USB-C with its various 3.0, 3.1, 3.2 and 3.2 Generation 2, 3.2 Generation 2×2 standards and the speed you get from them when connected to a Mac is complicated to understand. If you want to get an external hard drive or external display for your Mac then it will almost certainly have either a USB-C or Thunderbolt port to connect it to your Mac with.

If you’re confused by the increasingly complicated world of USB-C, USB 3.2 Gen 2×2, Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4, here we explain the difference in speeds and standards.

Usb 2 vs usb 3 speeds