On Jan 15, 2018, at 9:10 AM, david <david at daku.org> wrote: > > - SATA3 is faster than USB3 (I think) Almost always, yes. > But sometimes one has no choice. Only if you have no PCI slots, and hence can’t put a better interface into the system. > The Mac pro may look cute in its black cylinder, for example, but there's no place to add anything to it. The old trashcan Mac Pro has *six* Thunderbolt 2 ports in 3 separate busses, running at a reliable 20 GBit/sec per bus. Contrast USB 3.0, which might deliver its promised 5 Gbit/sec on a perfect bench test with uncommonly good cabling and other hardware, and where there’s a fair chance you have only 1 or 2 busses per system, with the bandwidth shared among the ports on each bus. Much of the difference in quality between USB and Thunderbolt comes from the fact that Thunderbolt is almost exclusively found on professional-grade machines, so there isn’t as much drive behind the old race to the bottom, so that there actually are reliable Thunderbolt cables and enclosures available, and the vendors of same tend not to cheap out on things like power supplies. You won’t pay $13.64 for a Thunderbolt enclosure and cable, though. The same is true of other professional-grade storage busses like Fibre Channel. You gets what you pays for. Contrast eSATA, which I’ve found to be about as troublesome as USB, again due to a race to the bottom.