Chosen Solution
I have a Samsung T5 external boot drive. What kind of speed transfer can I get through a Thunderbolt 2 cable into a Thunderbolt 2 to 3 adapter into the drive? Currently using usb. Which seems slow. Not sure of my USB ports on this old IMac. It says usb 2.0 in system data, but apple says 3.0. Trying to get as fast as possible, be it that it only has Thunderbolt 2.
Sadly, there is no adapter to allow you to use USB devices on the older Thunderbolt 2 ports your system has. The adapter Apple offers is the other way around Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter so people who buy a newer system can use their older drives. I have not seen any other type of adapter and the system won’t have the needed logic to support the USB dialog via the TB port. Think of it this way a water pipe can’t serve cooking gas as well can it. I have a few of these Samsung drives which are quite good! It offers a proper USB A 3.0 interface, as such it will given you the full data rate the SSD can offer! I get Read speeds of 4.5 Gbit/s (560 MB/s) on 2012 & 2015 15” MacBook Pro’s The theoretical transfer speed of USB 3.0 is 4.8 Gbit/s (600MB/s) vs. 480 Mbit/s (60MB/s) which is a 10X improvement. Here’s a good review Samsung T5 SSD - speed test with 2013 Mac Pro (USB3.0) and MacBook Pro (USB3.1) Now keep in mind the max throughput of USB 3.0 I posted above and now just to the time point 5:30 to see the graph in the video. Do you see the max Read speed is just a bit over the max of the 3.0 spec so are you really gaining that much? Nope! The limitation of the SSD is holding back what the USB-C connection can offer. So if you want still faster I/O then you need to look at a very different drive and sadly I/O channel as well which brings us to: Thunderbolt 3 (up to 40Gb/s)USB 4 (up to 40Gb/s) A RAID’ed SSD drive to max out the full channel, as well as a newer Mac too!
