Since USB 3.0 advertises 625 megabytes/second, and thunderbolt as 1.25gigabytes/sec, would it be wasted to use on a 7200rpm hard disk drive? I ask because it appears as if the read and write speeds of such hard drives max out in the 100-200 range. It seems as though USB 3.0 and thunderbolt is only useful on an SDD. Heck even a flash drive can utilize USB 3.0 faster at 200 megabytes/sec. What gives?
Is USB 3.0 and thunderbolt useless on a 7200rpm HDD?
- Thread starter absorb333
- Start date
Solution
Yep, most consumer grade HDDs don't run over 200MB/s, and 300MB/s cap of SATA II has not been broken by many. Well yes there some more bandwidth demanding tasks for which 3.0 speeds are useful, actually, take it this way, the tech below 3.0, the USB 2.0, is limited to 60MB/s, which caps the HDDs, so 3.0 not only has ample bandwidth for HDDs, but you can even connect multiple HDDs using a hub through a single 3.0 port 
smackers_12
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- Jul 4, 2013
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It is, spinning media can only read so fast as it has to spin for the data to be read. The head has to move to read the data, this takes time (however small). Its not useless you can still use it. A flash drive is faster because flash memory is inherently faster as there is nothing to move.
MeteorsRaining
Champion
- Jul 27, 2014
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Yep, most consumer grade HDDs don't run over 200MB/s, and 300MB/s cap of SATA II has not been broken by many. Well yes there some more bandwidth demanding tasks for which 3.0 speeds are useful, actually, take it this way, the tech below 3.0, the USB 2.0, is limited to 60MB/s, which caps the HDDs, so 3.0 not only has ample bandwidth for HDDs, but you can even connect multiple HDDs using a hub through a single 3.0 port
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