Portable Thunderbolt to USB 3.0 adapter #

Kanex delivered on their promise to ship a Thunderbolt to USB 3.0 / eSATA adapter by late June. I received one the other day and ran some benchmarks on a Late 2011 MacBook Pro (2 USB 2.0 ports and 1 Thunderbolt port) running OS X 10.9.4:

USB 3.0 Hard Drive
Interface	Read	Write
Onboard USB 2.0 port	33 MB/s	26 MB/s
Thunderbolt-USB 3.0 adapter	101 MB/s	100 MB/s

USB 3.0 Solid State Drive
Interface	Read	Write
Onboard USB 2.0 port	35 MB/s	29 MB/s
Thunderbolt-USB 3.0 adapter	238 MB/s	225 MB/s

Notes:

Unlike a certain hard drive manufacturer's 2.5" SATA to Thunderbolt adapter purchased (and replaced to no avail) a year or two ago, the Kanex adapter does not disconnect every few moments.
In addition to dd, Blackmagic Disk Speed Test and AJA System Test were used for benchmarking. (BDST may offer an advantage for SSD users: "Some SSDs use hidden compression when writing data to make their benchmarked speeds appear faster. Disk Speed Test will now measure the true speed of these SSDs")
A Thunderbolt to USB 3.0 and gigabit Ethernet adapter is slated to be released shortly.

/mac | Jul 05, 2014

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