
Look at these three Cable Matters options’ street prices, comparable to those from other companies: Try to find the shortest cable that provides the highest speed you need. The prices can be substantially different. For 40Gbps over Thunderbolt 3 or 4, you can either use a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 passive cable that’s 1.65 feet (0.5 m) or an active cable that’s up to 6.6 feet long.Ī USB-C to USB-C cable marked 40 with a USB logo can only be USB 4, allowing up to 20 Gbps or up to 40 Gbps.For 20Gbps over Thunderbolt 3 or 4, you can use a passive cable labeled for Thunderbolt 3 or 4 at lengths up to 6.6 feet (2 meters).These cables must have USB-C connectors on both ends. For 20Gbps over USB, the cable you want should be labeled for SuperSpeed/SS USB 20Gbps.These cables may have a Type-A or USB-C connector on the computer side and a 3.0 Type-B, 3.0 Micro-B, or USB-C connector on the drive end. For 10Gbps speeds over USB, look for a cable with SuperSpeed+ or SuperSpeed/SS USB 10 Gbps logo on it.You can find 5Gbps cables that have Type-A at one end to plug into a computer on the other, either 3.0 Type-B (like the 2.0 squareish one, but with an bump out at the bottom) or the 3.0 Micro-B, a wider version of the 2.0 Micro-B that remains in common use for headphones, ebook readers, non-Apple smartphones, and other devices for charging and USB 2.0 data transfer.

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You can use your slowest port on a Mac or a USB 3 hub attached to it and likely achieve the maximum possible rate.Īs I noted in another Mac 911 article about using an SSD for an external Photos library, you can buy a fairly affordable SSD that has an internal SATA interface and delivers no more than about 600MBps, which is conveniently just below the 5Gbps baseline speed of any USB 3 port. That means the fastest drive at 200MBps can only perform at under 2Gbps, and any USB 3 port would suffice. A “fast” 7,200 rpm drive can bump read speeds to 200MBps and writes to 150MBps. Such drives can perform at about 100 megabytes per second (MBps) for read and write. A 5,400 revolutions per minute (rpm) hard drive might be fine for Time Machine or other high-capacity purposes in which transfer speeds aren’t a key issue.
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For instance, the late 2014 model Mac mini has four USB ports that support 5Gbps the 2020 M1 Mac mini has two Type-A ports that also support 5Gbps (3.1 Gen 1), but the USB-C ports handle USB 3.1 Gen (10Gbps) and USB 4 plus Thunderbolt 3 and 4 (20Gbps).Ĭonsider this when looking at drive performance. (We reviewed Mactracker as a Mac Gem.) Note the speed listed for various ports.

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You can use the free Mactracker to look up your model of Mac, focusing on the Connections tab.

How far away can your drive live from your Mac?.

