At this time performance remains a draw because of bottleneck issues caused by external devices. Thunderbolt has won two categories (speed and use cases) whilst USB is the cheaper of the two. Winner: Thunderbolt - Has the ability to hook up displays and daisy chain peripherals without sacrificing performance.

It also provides charging power for handheld devices but lacks the ability to connect monitors. Meanwhile, USB is restricted to hooking up storage devices along with peripherals such as memory sticks, mice, keyboards, printers and mobile devices. One final, overlooked point concerns the physical design of connectors: Thunderbolt ports are 4mm narrower than USB 3 connections, which means they'll fit in tinier spaces on smaller devices. Thunderbolt works with PCI Express too, allowing it to handle workstation-level tasks like Genlock and Fibre Channel, the high-speed networking technology. Of course daisy-chaining isn't restricted to monitors, as you can hook up multiple peripherals ranging from storage devices to video capture gadgets. Thunderbolt has PCI Express and DisplayPort integrated into it - the latter allowing it to connect up 4K displays. The interface also allows you to run six daisy-chained displays from one Thunderbolt connection, for example. Winner: USB - This is widely used helping to make it considerably cheaper. Apple's Retina MacBook Pros are priced comparably to high-end Windows rivals, but you'll still have to shell out over 1,000 and the Mac Pro starts at a wallet-busting 2,499.

Thunderbolt is in its infancy and there is a high cost of entry. Winner: Draw - Once storage based around PCI Express and M.2 connections are common, we'll see Thunderbolt take a convincing lead in the area of data transfer. Right now, USB 3 and Thunderbolt are neck-and-neck but only because the surrounding technology isn't capable of utilising the speed provided by Thunderbolt.

Both interfaces returned similar pace when opening photos, backing up folders and loading games, with only a significant improvement gained when backing up files from a RAM disk. There still wasn't a huge gap between USB 3 and Thunderbolt when SSD-based products were tested. Sister title PC Pro illustrated the bottlenecking caused by hard disks: in its tests it found that file reads and writes remained virtually the same when USB 3 and Thunderbolt connections were used on hard disk-based external drives.

Usb 3 transfer rate vs thunderbolt