Thunderbolt 4 storage solutions

I'm looking with little success on reliable information regarding Thunderbolt 4 storage, specifically external hard drives. I do a ton of imaging with very large files and am really not happy with transfer speeds on my Lacie D2 externals with . I (almost) always work off an internal hard drive and transfer to backup after the fact, but I'd love to be able to reliably work off an external hard drive for more flexibility at times.

I'm also not ready to break the bank on this—but I may not have a choice, I realize. Input?

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 14.3

Posted on Oct 12, 2024 1:43 PM

Top-ranking reply

Tesserax

Level 10

158,748 points

Posted on Oct 12, 2024 4:35 PM

As I'm sure you are already aware, your 16" MacBook Pro is equipped with three Thunderbolt 4/USB4 ports. Both of these standards support up to 40 Gbps transfer rates (however those rates are not constant with USB4) and use the USB-C port types. Thus, as you suspected, you will generally see better performance with Thunderbolt 4 peripherals.

Of course, as you noted, Thunderbolt 4 (currently), come at a much higher price point.

The other part of the equation would be the external device itself. In this case, an external drive.

As a general rule, going from slowest to fastest when it comes to data transfer rates, they would be:

Flash drives. The fastest currently available have USB 3.2 support. (20 Gbps)
Hard disk drives. AFAIK, there are no USB4 HDDs available.
mSATA SSDs. These are the predecessors to the M.2 NVMe SSDs and I believe are limited to USB 3.1. (10 Gbps)
M.2 NVMe SSDs. You can find USB4 enclosures for these. (40 Gbps)

Again, the price point will become a factor for drives as well, with the USB4 M.2 NVMe being the costliest.

View in context

Thunderbolt 4 storage solutions

Similar questions