USB-C speed on iPad Air 4th Gen with thunderbolt 3 Mac

I wanted to add onto this, as I was upset to also discover that the iTunes/Finder protocol seems to only be capable of maxing out at USB 2 speeds.

I have a 10gb network at home, so I figured I’d buy some USB-C to Ethernet dongles. I bought both a 2.5 gigabit/s dongle and a 5 gigabit/s dongle, both from Trendet. The 5 gigabit/s dongle wasn’t even running at 1 gigabit/s speeds, and I later realized it’s because this device requires drivers, so it will not work to its potential on an iPad. However, the 2.5 gigabit/s works at its rated speed. Using Samba, I’m able to use the Files app on the iPad to send files to my PC at speeds up to 300 megabytes/s, around 250 megabytes/s on average.

Sadly, I think most of the USB-C to Ethernet dongles that are capable of 5 gigabits/s all use the same chip right now, so I don’t think the hardware currently exists to get anything higher via Samba.

I tried a Thunderbolt cable, makes no difference. The iPad doesn’t support Thunderbolt, so it’ll work just like any other super speed USB cable, I think.

I’ve heard nice stories about the iPad pro too, but well… that’s a different device.

The port on the iPad Air does support 5Gb/s, like you test with the SSD drive confirms. I can connect a 4K monitor to the iPad over that port. It’s just the USB connection to the Mac (i.e. iTunes, or now Finder), which uses a different protocol from the two previous ones, that doesn’t support 5Gb/s.

What I’ll do on occasion is take the iPad to someone who gets 5Gb/s from his MacBook↔︎iPad Pro connection, and see what happens.

I tried one more thing.

MacBook → Thunderbolt docking station with Ethernet port → Cat 6e ethernet cable → Satechi USB-C adaptor with Ethernet port → iPad.

After a while the iPad and MacBook invent some self-assigned IP addresses. I then turn on File Sharing on the MacBook, and add the network share as a connection in the FE File Explorer app on the iPad.

Hurray! File transfers at about 80–90MB/s which translates to somewhere around 700Mb/s.

Not exactly 5Gb/s, but better than USB 2.0 :-)

The ethernet ports in the connection are «Gigabit» ones, i.e. up to 1000Mb/s, so we shouldn’t expect much more.

Other possible limiting factors (if we had faster ethernet for instance)

• Speed supported by MacBook over SMB
• The network speed the iPad supports over USB-C
• The write speed to the iPad’s SSD

Had fun.

Exactly my problem.

I’m connecting a (non-Apple) mobile phone to the Macbook and System Information says «Up to 5Gb/s» (not that it gets that fast, but that’s a different issue)

Using the same cable, the connection to the iPad Air 4th gen is reported as «Up to 480Mb/s»

Since you got good speeds from your SSD, I tried something similar: I connected a Satechi adapter with an SD card rated 90MB/s. I wrote a 1GB file from the Mac to the SD card. I read it back to the Mac at about 700Mb/s (can’t hope for more from the SD card). I plugged the same adapter into the iPad, and copied the same file at about 600Mb/s, which is still significantly more than USB 2 speeds.

So yeah, MacBook ↔︎ XYZ is fast, iPad ↔︎ XYZ is fast, MacBook ↔︎ iPad is slow.

On second thought, we’re comparing apples and oranges: a portable SSD or an SD card belongs to the USB mass storage class, so the communication gives block-oriented access to a disk. The connection between Mac and iPad can’t do that.

That’s not an excuse for USB 2.0 speeds of course.

If its 480MB/s, it almost equal to 5Gb/s, because 480MB/s equal to 3.8Gb/s, more or less 0.48 GB/s.

The capital B and the lower case b means different speed

WilliamSu123, I think Rockmellon accidentally typed a B instead of a b in his original post. It’s 480Mb/s we’re getting, not 480MB/s.

Okay...