#Thunderbolt 2 external hard drive windows 10#
#Thunderbolt 2 external hard drive pro#

The MacBook Pro and storage testbed are native Thunderbolt 3 and required the Apple adapter when testing the Akitio Thunder2 PCIe. The Akitio Thunder2 performs slightly better than the companyвЂ™s Node Lite on older Thunderbolt 1 and 2 Macs, but will limit NVMe on Thunderbolt 3 Macs.

#Thunderbolt 2 external hard drive windows 10#

I reformatted the drives to NTFS for the Windows 10 tests. I tested using AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark under Windows 10 from the same dual-booting Core i7-2600 iMac, as well as PCWorldвЂ™s Core i7-5820K storage testbed. I tested under macOS on the aforementioned Core i7-2600 iMac, a 2016 MacBook Pro Core i7-6700, and a 2015 MacBook Air i7-5650KK using BlackmagicвЂ™s DiskSpeed with the drives formatted to HFS+. I tested the three drives I mentioned above in each enclosure: IntelвЂ™s 750 PCIe, IntelвЂ™s Optane 900P, and SamsungвЂ™s far more affordable 970 EVO. To flesh out the performance picture I used the two aforementioned enclosures: AkitioвЂ™s Thunder2 PCIe (a native Thunderbolt 2 product), and the Thunderbolt 3-based Akitio Node Lite.

Thunderbolt 3 proved the panacea, with read/write rates that roughly equal what IвЂ™ve seen from the same drives mounted internally on Windows PCs. I also did a quick test on a friendвЂ™s 2015 MacBook Air with 20 Gbps Thunderbolt 2, and things really got moving with a healthy 1.2 GBps read/write rate. The Apple Thunderbolt adapter is required to use it on Thunderbolt 1 or 2 Macs.ДЄfter some head-scratching and other physical manifestations of frustration I wonвЂ™t discuss, it occurred to me that the Intel 750, being an older enterprise product from the days of NVMe 1.1 (the NVMe spec is now up to 1.3) might need a firmware upgrade. If you want to future-proof with a Thunderbolt 3 PCIe enclosure, it needs to be one such as the Akitio Node Lite with a chip that Apple supports. Slower than SATA? Seriously Murphy? Akitio Neither was I expecting the 350 MBps reading and writing that the Node Lite/Intel 750 combo initially delivered on my iMac. Nice, but I certainly wasnвЂ™t expecting the same resultsВ on a Thunderbolt 1 port, with an adapter, and older 2nd generation Intel CPU in play. In my testing for PCWorldвЂ™s Akitio Thunder3 PCIe review with a 1.2TB Intel 750В NVMe PCIe SSD inside, the combo read at about 2 GBps and wrote at well over 1 GBps. And thereвЂ™s only a minor performance penalty with the adapter. Also, Thunderbolt is the future and performs much better on newer Macs. The issue here is that many Thunderbolt 2 boxes are reaching end of life. ItвЂ™s completely compatible with Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2 Macs.

I should point out that I couldвЂ™ve avoided all this with the Akitio Thunder2 PCIe, which I later acquired for testing. AkitioДЇinally, Akitio sent a Node Lite which uses TIвЂ™s newer 65983 (as does AkitioвЂ™s Node Pro) chip that Apple does support, and I was sure that NVMe bliss was nearly upon me. IDGДЄpple doesnвЂ™t support the communications chip sported in many early NVMe PCIe enclosures such as the Thunder3 PCIe shown below. Any enclosure using this chip with throw the message you see below. The early-to-market models I tried initially-the aforementioned Aktio Thunder3 PCIe and Akitio Node-work fine on Windows PCs, but they use TIвЂ™s 65982 communications chip, which predates AppleвЂ™s adoption of Thunderbolt 3. This adapter is fine for connecting Thunderbolt 2 devices to Thunderbolt 3 ports, but wonвЂ™t work the other way around.ДЄfter the Apple adapter was in place, the next issue was Thunderbolt PCIe enclosure compatibility. The bi-directional Apple adapter does both. This experiment was the exact opposite, a Thunderbolt 3 device to a Thunderbolt 1 port. The $50 units from Akitio and Startech I tried initially were uni-directional in the wrong direction-they would only handle Thunderbolt 1 or 2 devices attached to a Thunderbolt 3 port. At the time of this writing, AppleвЂ™s Thunderbolt adapter was the only one available that allows you to successfully use Thunderbolt 3 devices on a Thunderbolt 1 or 2 port.