it wasn't long ago that external storage wasn't nearly as good as using the drive
that was inside your computer not only were lots of portable storage solutions
centered around mechanical drives or slower flash sticks but the connections
themselves weren't as great usb 2.0 was a rather
slow interface and e-SATA while much faster suffered from issues with hot
plugability and compatibility then the various flavors of usb 3 hit
the scene alongside flash drives and ssds that rivaled or even beat the
performance of traditional internal drives leading us finally to the current
king of the hill and the topic of today's video sponsored by sabrint
Thunderbolt 3. it's a flashy sounding connection with
flashy speeds to match in fact it can provide up to 40 gigabits per second of
bandwidth over the pci express bus that's nearly seven times faster than a
standard SATA connection but if you've ever shopped for an
external Thunderbolt 3 device particularly for storage you may have
gotten some sticker shock i mean it does make at least some kind
of sense although Thunderbolt 3 uses a usb type-c connector it's much faster
than standard usb devices about double
even the newest usb 3.2 gen 2x2
but is the extra speed alone worth it
well it can be but only under specific conditions now there are external
Thunderbolt 3 ssds out there that can exceed the maximum speeds that usb can
provide but keep in mind that just because an
SSD uses the Thunderbolt 3 protocol
doesn't mean that you're getting close to its theoretical maximum so you need
to check both of those spec sheets as well as reputable independent reviews to
get an idea of whether the real world performance will actually benefit from
the extra bandwidth furthermore while the extra speed can be
useful if you're using your external drive for something very bandwidth heavy
such as video editing in the real world
unless you're constantly moving large files back and forth and and timing it
with your watch the main benefit of Thunderbolt 3 is
probably going to be that it connects to your system's pci express bus directly
so you should experience a bit less overhead and latency to be clear we're
not saying Thunderbolt 3 doesn't have other benefits than speed
usb has certainly made up some ground in recent years and now also supports high
resolution displays and up to a hundred watts of power to target devices just
like Thunderbolt 3 but if every device in the chain which includes the cable
has Thunderbolt 3 support it can do some really cool stuff
because it uses pci express you can hook up giant raided storage towers to it
without any performance concerns and then beyond storage you'll find all
kinds of things like audio interfaces external graphics cards 4k capture cards
10 gigabit networking cards and even just
bearing closures that you could stick whatever pci express device you want
into but while Thunderbolt 3 definitely has some good uses like so many things
in the technology world we would strongly recommend making sure you
actually need it before you start shelling out your cache because
i mean everything about it even the cables that
you'll need are more expensive i mean though if you really think about it do
any of us need more than four walls a roof and a faucet
okay food maybe too
love speaking of love i love doing these
segues for you guys if you do find yourself needing a Thunderbolt 3
solution check out our sponsor for today's video sabrin their Thunderbolt 3
external NVMe SSD with bumper guard gets you read speeds of up to 2 400 megabytes
a second and write speeds of up to 1200 megabytes a second it's great for video
editing content creation or anything else that requires super speedy storage
and the bumper guard will keep your drive protected on the go check it out
today at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys like dislike
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