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Gift shopping: USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt?
hthecraftyelf
Posts: 28 Forumite
in Techie Stuff
I was trying to grab some USB 3.0 related bargains in this holiday season (such as this one: http://www.inateck.com/christmas/) to enhance the speed/ read speed on my Mac Pro but I've actually heard people on the forums say there should be all TB ports and no USB... I mean WHAT!?
Honestly I was unable to find a thread dedicated to thunderbolt information and 'Ive been seeing a lot of people purchasing thunderbolt devices and wondering why... I think that bandwidth discussions are frequently confusing to people. In there attempts to have the best stuff, they wind up wasting money on the newest tech like thunderbolt. Its cool, but they don't need it.. Let me explain. I'm gonna talk about its practicality for data transfer and hooking up peripherals for the average consumer. That's 99% of us here.
Thunderbolt has a theoretical throughput of 10Gbps each direction. TB2 is even faster. Lets talk about storage and data transfer. Now, if you were going to buy something like an external hard drive or an enclosure, you'd want the fastest connection right? right? Well hold on...
Thunderbolt may have a theoretical throughput of 10Gbps. But where is the information coming from and going? We have to consider where the bottle necks are in the system. So if I wanted to transfer a file from my internal 1TB spinning 5400 rpm hard drive to my external Seagate 3TB barracuda drive connected via USB 3.0, where are the bottle necks?
USB 3.0 has a theoretical throughput of 5Gbps... Half of thunderbolt.
My drives are connected via SATA III 6Gbps
My external drive has read/write speeds of 170/152
My internal drive has read/write speeds of 80/74
That file has to be read from the internal HDD and written to the external HDD. Unfortunately, my super slow internal 1TB drive can only read at about 80 mbps... When I transfer that file, it happens at less than 100 mbps. Theres a USB 3.0 cable there with a throughput of 5000 mbps... But the drives can't access the data that fast. For anyone using a standard hard drive or even a single SSD, you're likely to never max out the current USB3.0 spec while transferring files. Even if you had a super fast platform, you're going to saturate the SATA III equipment before TB as well.
Now, if you have 4 SSDs all running in RAID0 and you're transferring to an external raid enclosure with 4 SSDs all running in RAID0, by all means, use thunderbolt to maximize your transfer speeds. Your hard disks can provide the data and write it fast enough to make use of the TB technology. However, if you have this sort of setup, I doubt you're at all concerned with the price of a thunderbolt cable.
Now, TBs daisy chaining capabilities are pretty cool. But seriously, most consumers are not going to have more than 3 devices and their computers likely provide the connections to manage that. In addition, USB 3.0 can take advantage of USB hubs and maintain connectivity and full transfer speeds to multiple devices. USB3.0 can power docking stations and provide video, audio, internet and a plethora of USB connected devices to the PC through a single USB3.0 cord. My dad is rocking this setup now with a Lenovo USB 3.0 dock powering two 20" monitors at 1080p, speakers, ethernet, mouse, keyboard and HDD... All through a single USB 3.0 cord to his laptop.
I've tried to convey that USB 3.0 can do anything the average consumer needs. In my opinion, it's the only option for the 99% of the consumer market. Even most of the consumer professionals couldn't take advantage of TB. And that's just the thing, its not just that you don't need it, you also probably can't even make full use of it.
The cost of TB is astounding. There is no reason any consumers should be purchasing this stuff right now. Especially since you're not likely to notice a difference. And USB 3.0 is so much more abundant.
For those of you who bought a thunderbolt apple display. By all means, connect it with a TB cable. For those of you considering picking up a second monitor and thinking you're limited to TB as your connection, simply use a display port to HDMI adapter and save a bunch of money.
Hopefully this information helps some people make smart financial decisions when they're shopping this holiday season. If you're a regular PC user or even a professional who's works frequently on a PC, think hard about whether or not the cost is worth it. Just because its new doesn't mean you need it, nor can you make use of it.
I'd like to hear your thoughts and please correct me if I'm wrong.
Honestly I was unable to find a thread dedicated to thunderbolt information and 'Ive been seeing a lot of people purchasing thunderbolt devices and wondering why... I think that bandwidth discussions are frequently confusing to people. In there attempts to have the best stuff, they wind up wasting money on the newest tech like thunderbolt. Its cool, but they don't need it.. Let me explain. I'm gonna talk about its practicality for data transfer and hooking up peripherals for the average consumer. That's 99% of us here.
Thunderbolt has a theoretical throughput of 10Gbps each direction. TB2 is even faster. Lets talk about storage and data transfer. Now, if you were going to buy something like an external hard drive or an enclosure, you'd want the fastest connection right? right? Well hold on...
Thunderbolt may have a theoretical throughput of 10Gbps. But where is the information coming from and going? We have to consider where the bottle necks are in the system. So if I wanted to transfer a file from my internal 1TB spinning 5400 rpm hard drive to my external Seagate 3TB barracuda drive connected via USB 3.0, where are the bottle necks?
USB 3.0 has a theoretical throughput of 5Gbps... Half of thunderbolt.
My drives are connected via SATA III 6Gbps
My external drive has read/write speeds of 170/152
My internal drive has read/write speeds of 80/74
That file has to be read from the internal HDD and written to the external HDD. Unfortunately, my super slow internal 1TB drive can only read at about 80 mbps... When I transfer that file, it happens at less than 100 mbps. Theres a USB 3.0 cable there with a throughput of 5000 mbps... But the drives can't access the data that fast. For anyone using a standard hard drive or even a single SSD, you're likely to never max out the current USB3.0 spec while transferring files. Even if you had a super fast platform, you're going to saturate the SATA III equipment before TB as well.
Now, if you have 4 SSDs all running in RAID0 and you're transferring to an external raid enclosure with 4 SSDs all running in RAID0, by all means, use thunderbolt to maximize your transfer speeds. Your hard disks can provide the data and write it fast enough to make use of the TB technology. However, if you have this sort of setup, I doubt you're at all concerned with the price of a thunderbolt cable.
Now, TBs daisy chaining capabilities are pretty cool. But seriously, most consumers are not going to have more than 3 devices and their computers likely provide the connections to manage that. In addition, USB 3.0 can take advantage of USB hubs and maintain connectivity and full transfer speeds to multiple devices. USB3.0 can power docking stations and provide video, audio, internet and a plethora of USB connected devices to the PC through a single USB3.0 cord. My dad is rocking this setup now with a Lenovo USB 3.0 dock powering two 20" monitors at 1080p, speakers, ethernet, mouse, keyboard and HDD... All through a single USB 3.0 cord to his laptop.
I've tried to convey that USB 3.0 can do anything the average consumer needs. In my opinion, it's the only option for the 99% of the consumer market. Even most of the consumer professionals couldn't take advantage of TB. And that's just the thing, its not just that you don't need it, you also probably can't even make full use of it.
The cost of TB is astounding. There is no reason any consumers should be purchasing this stuff right now. Especially since you're not likely to notice a difference. And USB 3.0 is so much more abundant.
For those of you who bought a thunderbolt apple display. By all means, connect it with a TB cable. For those of you considering picking up a second monitor and thinking you're limited to TB as your connection, simply use a display port to HDMI adapter and save a bunch of money.
Hopefully this information helps some people make smart financial decisions when they're shopping this holiday season. If you're a regular PC user or even a professional who's works frequently on a PC, think hard about whether or not the cost is worth it. Just because its new doesn't mean you need it, nor can you make use of it.
I'd like to hear your thoughts and please correct me if I'm wrong.
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Comments
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Thunderbolt is a future thing. What your dad is doing is what Thunderbolt is really for. You're thinking inside the box - one HDD connected via one cable. USB3 is great for that, and it isn't going anwhere. Most people are still stuck on USB2 speeds. Just buy the USB3 kit!0
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So is this a case of the OP here is the OP there? Or the OP here plagiarised the OP there without proper reference (i.e. copyright theft)?0 -
USB vs Thunderbolt reminds me of USB vs Firewire although I realise technologically that's not really the case but at the time USB was inferior to Firewire (even though on paper USB2 looked better). Firewire offered better performance and had a wider array of capabilities such as proper support for DV cameras. However USB devices were cheaper meaning the standard was far more widespread and firewire was generally left to more specialist use.
It's a similar situation now as USB3 is cheap and good enough for most people but I think in all your talk about raw data numbers you've missed the point of Thunderbolt. USB3 is a fixed standard but with Thunderbolt you can pass pretty much any standard across it including PCI-E devices effectively allowing you to have external PCI-E cards with a laptop that doesn't have space for cards. Also there's a lot more to it than just raw numbers, USB speeds always sound impressive but in practice it's much slower as the cheapness comes from the lack of dedicated hardware. Being able to carry a native PCI-E bus means in practice Thunderbolt can be significantly quicker with lower latency and processor usage.
So for example we use 10Gb ethernet at work, for the desktops we can stick in a PCI-E card and on laptops we use a 10Gb ethernet card connected over Thunderbolt. That's obviously only an enterprise requirement but there's more consumer orientated uses as well - Sony developed an external midrange graphics card for their previous Z series which connected over Thunderbolt allowing it to use the high speed PCI-E bus. USB3 would have been nowhere near fast enough for this solution and given how popular Ultrabooks are and usually lack discrete graphics, this was a great use of Thunderbolt, sadly it's now been discontinued. It's such a frequent questions with laptops about whether you can upgrade the graphics card (someone was asking this just last night) that it would be great if we'd reached the point of standardised external graphics cards.
The problem at the moment is that there's few companies supporting Thunderbolt, Apple have been driving hard with it but there's been little to no support from PC component manufacturers (Sony have completely abandoned the technology and I believe Acer have now as well). With little support from manufacturers, there's little incentive to produce Thunderbolt devices which in turn means manufacturers aren't supporting the standard. The cost of the Thunderbolt chips and the cables as well (which need a chip each side to encode/decode the incoming bus data) has remained high since there's been no mass market adoption.
To be honest I don't think there is much need for a post warning people that Thunderbolt may not offer the speed they believe it will, the significant cost and limited availability mean that anyone considering it is likely to be well aware of the technologies hence the lack of Thunderbolt topics here and on most other similar forums.
John0 -
USB vs Thunderbolt reminds me of USB vs Firewire although I realise technologically that's not really the case but at the time USB was inferior to Firewire (even though on paper USB2 looked better). Firewire offered better performance and had a wider array of capabilities such as proper support for DV cameras. However USB devices were cheaper meaning the standard was far more widespread and firewire was generally left to more specialist use.
It's a similar situation now as USB3 is cheap and good enough for most people but I think in all your talk about raw data numbers you've missed the point of Thunderbolt. USB3 is a fixed standard but with Thunderbolt you can pass pretty much any standard across it including PCI-E devices effectively allowing you to have external PCI-E cards with a laptop that doesn't have space for cards. Also there's a lot more to it than just raw numbers, USB speeds always sound impressive but in practice it's much slower as the cheapness comes from the lack of dedicated hardware. Being able to carry a native PCI-E bus means in practice Thunderbolt can be significantly quicker with lower latency and processor usage.
So for example we use 10Gb ethernet at work, for the desktops we can stick in a PCI-E card and on laptops we use a 10Gb ethernet card connected over Thunderbolt. That's obviously only an enterprise requirement but there's more consumer orientated uses as well - Sony developed an external midrange graphics card for their previous Z series which connected over Thunderbolt allowing it to use the high speed PCI-E bus. USB3 would have been nowhere near fast enough for this solution and given how popular Ultrabooks are and usually lack discrete graphics, this was a great use of Thunderbolt, sadly it's now been discontinued. It's such a frequent questions with laptops about whether you can upgrade the graphics card (someone was asking this just last night) that it would be great if we'd reached the point of standardised external graphics cards.
The problem at the moment is that there's few companies supporting Thunderbolt, Apple have been driving hard with it but there's been little to no support from PC component manufacturers (Sony have completely abandoned the technology and I believe Acer have now as well). With little support from manufacturers, there's little incentive to produce Thunderbolt devices which in turn means manufacturers aren't supporting the standard. The cost of the Thunderbolt chips and the cables as well (which need a chip each side to encode/decode the incoming bus data) has remained high since there's been no mass market adoption.
To be honest I don't think there is much need for a post warning people that Thunderbolt may not offer the speed they believe it will, the significant cost and limited availability mean that anyone considering it is likely to be well aware of the technologies hence the lack of Thunderbolt topics here and on most other similar forums.
John
Hi John,
To be honest... Very few devices are capable of pushing USB 3 or Thunderbolt to their limits. While USB 3’s theoretical 4.8Gb/s bandwidth translates into a potential throughput of 612MB/s, Thunderbolt’s claimed 10Gb/s promises transfer speeds of up to 1,280MB/sec – way beyond the capability of even the fastest SSDs.
Let's say if you're planning on buying an affordable external HDD, moving from USB 2 to USB 3 will bring noticeable improvement, especially if you’re backing up larger files, such as movies, music and photos. Moving from USB 3 to Thunderbolt won’t have much of an impact, however, and certainly not until you pay a premium for SSD-equipped devices or spend megabucks on high-end disk arrays.
In either case, I’d think long and hard before splashing out serious money: unless you’re an avid video producer who needs terabytes of data on a permanent high-speed link, or are planning to offload your games collection entirely to an external drive and can’t wait a few extra seconds for games to load, I’d stick with the cheaper HDD-based devices.
And if someone already have an HDD or two lying around, save your pennies and buy a USB 3 hard drive caddy – it’s a cheap and easy way to turn an old HDD into a high-speed external drive.
Mark0 -
Thunderbolt is a future thing. What your dad is doing is what Thunderbolt is really for. You're thinking inside the box - one HDD connected via one cable. USB3 is great for that, and it isn't going anwhere. Most people are still stuck on USB2 speeds. Just buy the USB3 kit!
Thank you almillar, that's a great advice just the one I needed. Cheers! :beer:0 -
So you admit plagiarising that other forum post?0
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hthecraftyelf wrote: »Hi John,
To be honest... Very few devices are capable of pushing USB 3 or Thunderbolt to their limits. While USB 3’s theoretical 4.8Gb/s bandwidth translates into a potential throughput of 612MB/s, Thunderbolt’s claimed 10Gb/s promises transfer speeds of up to 1,280MB/sec – way beyond the capability of even the fastest SSDs.
Let's say if you're planning on buying an affordable external HDD, moving from USB 2 to USB 3 will bring noticeable improvement, especially if you’re backing up larger files, such as movies, music and photos. Moving from USB 3 to Thunderbolt won’t have much of an impact, however, and certainly not until you pay a premium for SSD-equipped devices or spend megabucks on high-end disk arrays.
In either case, I’d think long and hard before splashing out serious money: unless you’re an avid video producer who needs terabytes of data on a permanent high-speed link, or are planning to offload your games collection entirely to an external drive and can’t wait a few extra seconds for games to load, I’d stick with the cheaper HDD-based devices.
And if someone already have an HDD or two lying around, save your pennies and buy a USB 3 hard drive caddy – it’s a cheap and easy way to turn an old HDD into a high-speed external drive.
Mark
Plenty of devices are capable of pushing Thunderbolt to its limit because it's far, far more than just a more simple technology like USB, there's a lot more to it than just basic transfer numbers and you need to stop thinking that Thunderbolt is a simple storage transfer technology.
Yes, Thunderbolt is fairly pointless when it comes to using with a single external drive but I haven't seen a single person asking for advice on whether to go for a Thunderbolt or USB3 drive on a forum like this or other similar ones so I really don't think it's a problem.
John0
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