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 ...
Thunderbolt 5 SSDs are now becoming available, and Seagate-owned LaCie is leading the category with the Rugged Pro5 SSD.
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 ...
TL;DR: Sparkle introduced the Studio-G 850 at CES 2025, a Thunderbolt ... a single-cable connection to transmit data and charge a laptop at the same time. Sparkle's new Studio-G 850 external ...