![]() The interface has long been the “forgotten” mass market, high-speed interface standard. In summary, Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 has their own respective strengths, and consumers can decide which route to go based on their budget and requirements. On the other hand, USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 have almost reached price parity and it’s a no-brainer to pick the former for everyday tasks. For this reason, Thunderbolt won’t be going mainstream anytime soon. There is, however, a limited number of applications that require such transfer rate and that only prosumers and professionals can tell whether or not the increase in performance justifies the added cost. To leverage the full potential of Thunderbolt, you need some high end components that will take you beyond 500MB/s at which speed will definitely dwarf USB 3.0, but they will also add to the cost of Thunderbolt products. In this case, USB 3.0 can complete the transfer fairly quickly (minute and a half if speed is at 110MB/s) without the cost premium of Thunderbolt. Taking the car to maximum speed without even touching the speed limit of highway itself is like copying 10GB or so of data to a 5400-rpm portable drive thru Thunderbolt. ![]() USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt, metaphorically speaking, are a good quality highway and peripherals are race cars. For everyone else, Thunderbolt maybe an overkill. Say if you have a need to capture multi-HD stream and save the video feed into a SSD RAID on a daily basis, then all by means Thunderbolt is a viable option for you. Rather it is more a niche interface, whereas USB is more of a mainstream port. While Thunderbolt is widely reported as USB 3.0 killer, it is not really a competing standard. Thunderbolt, which supersedes Mini DisplayPort on the latest Macs, has made way into all Apple laptops and desktops, except the Mac Pro. The expansion bus can support both hubs as well as a daisy chain of up to 7 devices. It was originally designed to use fiber optics, but Intel later went with copper wiring as a mean to reduce cost and to supply power. Developed by Intel, the 10Gb/s bi-directional interface is technically PCI Express on a cable.
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