Has anyone found a benefit of having music library on Thunderbolt over usb 3? (Correction USB3)
I have my current music library on a Thunderbolt 2 raid, but I’d like to free up the space on that very fast drive (over 1100mb/s) for video editing use.
I recently purchased a western digital 8 teribyte USB 3 external drive (Edit : mac has usb 3) that I could keep my entire music collection on.
I’ve never used Thunderbolt drives. I’ve never had any issues with USB drives feeding my various aging Mac servers that only support USB 2.
I haven’t attempted to try to do any sort of sonic comparison, if that’s what you’re asking. The guy who put together my custom Mini server (same as Paul’s) felt it was worth using a TB drive - it may be “quieter” if it requires less work from the computer - not sure. I would think USB3 would be fast enough for almost anything you could typically throw at it audio-wise, since it’s fast enough to record and play back multiple channels of high-res audio simultaneously.
I have come to realize that, despite its ubiquity as a digital audio protocol of choice, USB isn’t the best - mostly due to all the things that can affect it negatively, sonically. But if it’s just going from a drive to the computer as data (that is, not being output by a player as music) I’m not sure it would matter.
One potential issue is faster often equates to more noise.
I believe the AudioQuest Jitterbug supposedly was limited to USB 2 for that reason. Or it could have been because it was cheaper.
Or both! 