Thunderbolt and USB-C ports look identical, and they work in pretty much the same way. The broad-brush answer is that ...

Both Thunderbolt docks and the best USB-C hubs and dongles provide legacy ports (USB-A, microSD, and others), and connect PC peripherals like mice, printers, external hard drives, and more.

For ordinary external hard drives, Thunderbolt is very much the exception ... USB ports are ubiquitous, and many external drives now come with cables with both rectangular USB Type-A connectors ...

Even the slowest SSDs are generally faster than mechanical hard ... you want Thunderbolt 5 performance. We found that the standard USB-C cable we use for our Time Machine back-up drive didn ...

The top external SSDs and ... platters the way traditional hard drives do and thus operate a whole lot faster. The interface can also make a difference; Thunderbolt will be a lot faster than ...