Does Thunderbolt 3 make sense for 7200rpm external drives?

B

blade52x

2[H]4U
Joined
Sep 9, 2006
Messages
3,191
It's been forever since I've used a 7200rpm hard drive, and am curious if the drives today can reach of match the speed that Tunderbolt 3 allows for, or if I should just get a cheaper USB 3/3.1/c drive.

I'd be using one for regular and sequential access of files that are 100mb-1gb in size, that make up a much larger data set (>1tb).
 
blade52x said:
It's been forever since I've used a 7200rpm hard drive, and am curious if the drives today can reach of match the speed that Tunderbolt 3 allows for, or if I should just get a cheaper USB 3/3.1/c drive.
Click to expand...
Not worth it. The maximum physical sequential transfer speed of even the very fastest performing of such drives is the limiting factor. No 7200 RPM hard drive can sustain more than about 250 MB/s - and that's on the outer tracks of the drive. The sequential speed will plummet to about 80 to 90 MB/s on the inner tracks.
 
Not even remotely close... unless you have a massive RAID setup and controller card.

Thunderbolt 3 is insanely fast! I don't even saturate Thunderbolt 2 on my 12 bay RAID system using x12 240Mbps 7200rpm 8TB drives that all read and write simultaneously.
 
I dumpster dived a TB2 6 bay box, even in raid 0 it won't come close. Was a great find, only had to burn $40 on the apple bi-directional TB3 adapter to use for portable backup along with my giant collection of drives, raid 6 of course. Ideally I'd want a ZFS array like my other storage builds but for a quick thing to plug into whatever windows or mac to shove files on its great.
 
Thanks guys. I'm not doing anything special, so I'll just save my money and go with a USB 3.1 Gen 1 drive. I wonder why they sell individual drives with TB3 for like double the price if a single drive can't even come close to saturating the bandwidth. I'm sure there are other uses but I'm only concerned with performance of a single drive.
 
It has some advantages like daisy chaining that could be really handy in certain situations.
 
blade52x said:
Thanks guys. I'm not doing anything special, so I'll just save my money and go with a USB 3.1 Gen 1 drive. I wonder why they sell individual drives with TB3 for like double the price if a single drive can't even come close to saturating the bandwidth. I'm sure there are other uses but I'm only concerned with performance of a single drive.
Click to expand...

I had a good experience with a TB2 external SSD. I'm sure I wasn't using all the bandwidth but it was nice that it performed like an internal drive.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top