If you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of ports to plug cords into on your laptop. Although that number is getting smaller and smaller these days with newer Mac models, many people have 3 or more port options when transferring data.
- MagSafe port: Used for charging
- Ethernet port: 1Gbps
- Firewire 800: 780Mbps
- Thunderbolt 1: 10 Gbps (Wow!)
- Thunderbolt 2: 10 Gbps with 2 channels allowing 20 Gpbs (Super WOW!)
- USB 2: 480 Mbps
- USB 3: 5 Gbps
There is also Firewire 400 which transfers right around 400 Mbps. This is found on older Macs and is about the same as USB 2. So when choosing a port to use for backup, or just transfer some files, take a look at this chart and compare. Keep in mind when purchasing an external hard drive what ports are built in as none of these numbers are accurate unless both ends of the cable are the same. In other words if you use a Firewire 400 to Firewire 800 cable, your transfer rate will be 400 Mbps because that is the bottleneck.