I recently got a little external enclosure to use with a SATA SSD that was going unused. Nothing fancy, this one if you’re curious. I’ve been using it without issue with the short cable that it came with (and a USB A to C adapter) to connect to my 2019 Macbook Pro.
Today I was being lazy and instead of getting my butt out of my chair to get the cable from my bag, I just grabbed the closest USB-C cable to transfer some files to the SSD. The cable I happened to use was the one that came with my 2020 iPad Pro 11″. Hooked it all up and started copying over some files. Usually an operation that takes a few minutes. Ten minutes later? Still transferring. Confused I loaded up Blackmagic Disk Speed Test and ran some comparisons for fun.
That’s not right! 41 MB/s is super slow. So I tried the cable the drive enclosure came with.
439 MB/s! Ok, that’s much better. Then I tried a few more cables. How about the nice long and thick USB-C cable that came with my Macbook Pro?
Yikes! Super slow. For giggles (and it’s what I had laying around) the cable that came with my Pokeball Plus.
Again, super slow. These cable are just for charging, not for data transfer. To illustrate how slow, here’s a test using my external spinning disk Western Digital 4TB drive.
Not as fast as the SSD, naturally, but 100 MB/s faster than using the wrong cable on the SSD. 🙂
I know this might be common knowledge for some folks, but I was kinda surprised. Use the right cable folks!