Western Digital has a 3 TB USB 3.0 disk drive for $109. That's not just less expensive than Thunderbolt, it's radically less as I'd expect to pay $400 to $500+ for a Thunderbolt drive of equivalent capacity. As reviewed yesterday, the practical speed, as opposed to theoretical speed, is about the same for USB 3.0 vs Thunderbolt.
Note: I noticed one oddity in that the 6 TB version of the drive sells for $234. Why wouldn't a buyer get two of the 3 TB drives and save money. I have no answer for that. It's just unusual.
Western Digital is the preferred name in disk vendors for me as I've used them a lot and had very good success with them. The only one I've known to fail was fine for about six years and now sometimes it goes offline. The contents of the disk are fine and I'm not sure what's wrong with the drive. Reseating it brings it back online so that gives the thought of what happens if I put it into a different drive bay. (It's not my computer but one on which I do some nursing sometimes.)
The discovery today pushes USB 3.0 into a clear win. Unless you're doing 4K videography or some particularly-twisted kind of gaming, I don't see any particular reason to spend the extra money for Thunderbolt.
Note: it would be unwise to ignore it as Apple moves faster with disk protocols than anyone else. Resolving problems with performance bottlenecks is moving into more sophisticated areas beyond making the drives faster. A real world example is a turnstile onto the platform at a train station. It doesn't matter how fast you can move people into the waiting room as what controls the performance of the 'system' is how fast they can get through the turnstile onto the platform.
Note: I noticed one oddity in that the 6 TB version of the drive sells for $234. Why wouldn't a buyer get two of the 3 TB drives and save money. I have no answer for that. It's just unusual.
Western Digital is the preferred name in disk vendors for me as I've used them a lot and had very good success with them. The only one I've known to fail was fine for about six years and now sometimes it goes offline. The contents of the disk are fine and I'm not sure what's wrong with the drive. Reseating it brings it back online so that gives the thought of what happens if I put it into a different drive bay. (It's not my computer but one on which I do some nursing sometimes.)
The discovery today pushes USB 3.0 into a clear win. Unless you're doing 4K videography or some particularly-twisted kind of gaming, I don't see any particular reason to spend the extra money for Thunderbolt.
Note: it would be unwise to ignore it as Apple moves faster with disk protocols than anyone else. Resolving problems with performance bottlenecks is moving into more sophisticated areas beyond making the drives faster. A real world example is a turnstile onto the platform at a train station. It doesn't matter how fast you can move people into the waiting room as what controls the performance of the 'system' is how fast they can get through the turnstile onto the platform.
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