If speed is of the essence, it might be worth considering an external drive that uses single or multiple SSDs. While USB 3’s theoretical 4.8Gbits/sec bandwidth translates into a potential throughput of 612MB/sec, Thunderbolt’s claimed 10Gbits/sec promises transfer speeds of up to 1,280MB/sec – way beyond the capability of even the fastest SSDs. Very few devices are capable of pushing USB 3 or Thunderbolt to their limits. Backing up a 5GB folder filled with a mixture of file sizes took more than four minutes over USB 2 switching to USB 3 or Thunderbolt slashed that to less than two minutes. Opening images in Photoshop from the external drive took half the time with USB 3 or Thunderbolt, with 1GB of images loading in only 19 seconds – via USB 2, we were kept waiting for 46 seconds. In our real-world tests, the benefits of the faster interfaces remain obvious. Moving to a USB 3 or Thunderbolt connection almost tripled that figure: speeds increased to 116MB/sec – the maximum you can expect from a standard laptop HDD. This was especially noticeable while reading and writing larger files: the LaCie achieved a maximum transfer speed of 42MB/sec.
