How Some Thunderbolt 3 Cables Underperform With USB-only Drives
You can purchase what are effectively four kinds of cables that have USB-C connectors on both ends[…]
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The trouble that AppleInsider discovered arises only in a particular set of circumstances:
You have a hard drive with a USB-C port that supports only USB 3.1.
You’re using a Thunderbolt 3 cable to connect that drive to a Thunderbolt 3-capable computer.
The Thunderbolt 3 cable is active, rather than passive.
Instead of carrying up to 5 Gbps of USB 3.1 Gen 1 data, these active Thunderbolt cables throttle down to USB 2.0 speeds, offering about one-tenth as much throughput.
Update (2017-08-29): David Heinemeier Hansson:
Why have a USB-C standard if you need x-ray vision to determine what a given cable is capable of?
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Apple’s charger cable has no identifying markers. No clue it only carries power. Some times the computer industry is too smart for itself.
USB-C is giving Bluetooth a good run for its money as The Most Frustrating Standard out there.
This week I watched a genius fruitlessly try 5 USB-C cables to figure out which was Thunderbolt 3.
Jony Ive has taken minimalism too far.
