Question about Thunderbolt

[flyguy5]

I am planning on buying one of the new Silicon Macs. I want to move my photo library onto it.

I have a 1.7TB photo library on an external hard drive. (Drive is WD My Passport Ultra 4TB). I'm not sure if its Thunderbolt capable. Does the external HD need to be Thunderbolt capable or do I just need an adapter?

If I get a Thunderbolt cable, can I use target disk mode to copy the photo library from the external HD onto the Silicon Mac and how would this work? I am specifically asking if my external hard drive would support the high transfer speeds of Thunderbolt to circumvent the long copy time that a normal transfer would take. Basically I am asking if the Thunderbolt is a limitation of the external drive or USB 3.1 port. Does using an adapter with a Thunderbolt cable allow the external drive to take advantage of higher Thunderbolt transfer speeds?

 

[chrfr]

I am planning on buying one of the new Silicon Macs. I want to move my photo library onto it.

I have a 1.7TB photo library on an external hard drive. (Drive is WD My Passport Ultra 4TB). I'm not sure if its Thunderbolt capable. Does the external HD need to be Thunderbolt capable or do I just need an adapter?

If I get a Thunderbolt cable, can I use target disk mode to copy the photo library from the external HD onto the Silicon Mac and how would this work? I am specifically asking if my external hard drive would support the high transfer speeds of Thunderbolt to circumvent the long copy time that a normal transfer would take. Basically I am asking if the Thunderbolt is a limitation of the external drive or USB 3.1 port. Does using an adapter with a Thunderbolt cable allow the external drive to take advantage of higher Thunderbolt transfer speeds?

You will likely just need an inexpensive USB-C cable or adapter. Your drive doesn’t use Thunderbolt and target disk mode is just to connect 2 Macs together.

 

[flyguy5]

You will likely just need an inexpensive USB-C cable or adapter. Your drive doesn’t use Thunderbolt and target disk mode is just to connect 2 Macs together.

I was hoping that I would be able to take advantage of much higher transfer speeds with Thunderbolt, otherwise I would just copy the library straight from the drive into Finder without using TDM but it would take way longer.

 

[chrfr]

I was hoping that I would be able to take advantage of much higher transfer speeds with Thunderbolt, otherwise I would just copy the library straight from the drive into Finder without using TDM but it would take way longer.

The drive you have doesn’t even use full USB 3 speeds. External hard drives (not SSDs) gain no performance when connected over Thunderbolt.
Target Disk Mode isn’t relevant here; it’s not used when connecting an external disk to a Mac.