Question Are there thunderbolt ssds? What's the fastest/best?

UKTone

Distinguished
Feb 24, 2015
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I would've thought pcie 5.0 m.2 nve ssds would be the fastest and best you could get (and i could be right or that it may be right for internal storage only maybe?), but pcie 5.0 get up to about 14 GBps (not sure if that's its max, but fastest we've seen so far i believe) whereas Thunderbolt 3/4/5 gets up to 40/80/120 GBps respectively.

Are these the two fastest options?

Would it be a good idea to have your OS running through thunderbolt? Would it be a good idea to have a thunderbolt storage for large files? Which is more expensive, pcie 4 m.2s or thunderbolt 3 ssds?

I've never seen or really heard of thunderbolt ssds, slightly find it strange i've never been recommended any. So is there something wrong with them, are they too expensive, are they not reliable, do they exist, etc.?
 

kanewolf

Titan
Moderator
I would've thought pcie 5.0 m.2 nve ssds would be the fastest and best you could get (and i could be right or that it may be right for internal storage only maybe?), but pcie 5.0 get up to about 14 GBps (not sure if that's its max, but fastest we've seen so far i believe) whereas Thunderbolt 3/4/5 gets up to 40/80/120 GBps respectively.

Are these the two fastest options?

Would it be a good idea to have your OS running through thunderbolt? Would it be a good idea to have a thunderbolt storage for large files? Which is more expensive, pcie 4 m.2s or thunderbolt 3 ssds?

I've never seen or really heard of thunderbolt ssds, slightly find it strange i've never been recommended any. So is there something wrong with them, are they too expensive, are they not reliable, do they exist, etc.?
The real world difference comes when moving from HDD to SSD. EVERY speed increase after that has negligible real world differences. You can have big benchmark numbers but no perceptible change in performance. The delta differences are too small.
 
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