The first two standards work with Macs and deliver their maximum transfer rates of 5GB/s and 10GB/s with Thunderbolt ports on Macs. There are now 9 versions of USB-C, the latest being USB 3.1 Gen 1, USB-C Gen 2 and more recently, USB-3.2 Gen 2×2 and USB 4. Things get really confusing however with the multiple standards of USB-C that have been released since it was invented. The only way to tell them apart on a device is that Thunderbolt ports are labelled with the lightening strike symbol and USB-C ports are labelled by their standard such as USB 3.1, 3.2 etc. Visually, the ports are exactly the same oval shape and support the same cables. The difference between Thunderbolt and USB-C is increasingly confusing because since both ports were originally released, there have been several sub-versions since.
LaCie Rugged SSD Pro 1TB Solid State Drive In our research, we found the best thunderbolt drive for Mac is the Samsung X5 SSD for reliability, durability and incredible read speeds of almost 30GB/s. The fastest Thunderbolt drives are Solid State SSD drives which means they have no moving parts inside although it’s important to be aware that not all SSD drives support Thunderbolt.Īpart from speed, other advantages of Thunderbolt over USB-C include greater bandwidth to support more than one external monitor, daisy chaining multiple hard drives together and the ability to connect eGPUs (although only on Intel Macs not M1 or M2 Macs).
It also means that using a Thunderbolt drive is the fastest way to backup your Mac via macOS Time Machine. This is particularly important for video editors, musicians and graphic designers that need to edit and transfer large files in seconds rather than minutes. You can get data transfer speeds of up to 40GB/s with Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 compared to a maximum of 20GB/s with USB 3.2 Gen 2×2, 10 GB/s with USB 3.1 Gen 2 and 5 GB/s with USB 3.1 Gen 1. The advantage of Thunderbolt ports is the incredibly high data transfer rates they can achieve compared to the USB-C ports that most Windows PCs have. There’s no difference in speed between Thunderbolt 3 and 4 but Thunderbolt 4 is a slightly higher standard and can drive more high resolution 4K and 8K external displays on a Mac. In fact, we think that Thunderbolt Drives are easily the best external hard drives for M1 & M2 Macs. Since around 2017 most Macs have the fastest Thunderbolt 3 ports and the latest Apple Silicon Mac Studio, MacBook Pro and M2 Macs have Thunderbolt 4 ports. Thunderbolt is an advanced data transfer technology developed between Intel and Apple back in 2011 and all Macs now have Thunderbolt ports. If you want the fastest external hard drive for your Mac then you need a Thunderbolt drive so we’ve looked at the best external Thunderbolt drives for Mac of 2023.
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