Both USB 3 and Thunderbolt leave the transfer rates of yesteryear in the dust, with doubled speed in the works for USB 3.0 for a current-Thunderbolt equivalent 10Gb/s and doubled speed coming for 20Gb/s Thunderbolt rates. But in the meantime, the question stands: how does USB 3.0 compare in actual performance to Thunderbolt, and should you be in a rush to upgrade? Thanks to the guys over at Macworld, we now have some practical benchmark tests pitting the protocols against each other. Click below to see how USB 3 measured up.
Macworld asks the question, "How fast is USB 3.0 really?" -- and thanks to their work, we may now have a better idea given some real-world working conditions. The same series of tasks (more details below) were run first on a 2.5" Hitachi 7200 RPM 750GB spinning drive, then an OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD (actual models may vary), through the following connections:
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