Apple and Dongles

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Several years ago I broke my most important rule. Never take a laptop with you that you are not willing to carry at all times. I had a Mac Book Pro stolen and this was extremely frustrating. The reason for which it was frustrating is that this Mac Book from still had normal USB ports, an SD card reader and more. New Mac Book Pros have four USB-3/Thunderbolt 3 connectors.

## Thunderbolt 3 Nuissance

Some people love this, because it’s smaller, lighter, and faster but I hated the move because it meant that all my hard drives needed a dongle to work. All my charging cables for watches, cameras and more needed a dongle to work. You need a dongle for a wired connection and you simply always need a dongle. What’s worse is that you don’t need one dongle. You need two or three, or more.

## Easier to Lose

You need to keep track of the dongles. Sometimes they’re in one room, or drawer, and if you use them every few days or weeks they like to vanish so that instead of just plugging in a device you need to find the dongle, plug the USB cable to the dongle and the dongle to the laptop.

## Fast Drives but Slow Dongles

Yesterday I plugged in a USB C drive to one port, and a USB C flat adaptor drive to the apple dongle with the other. The transfer speed was much faster but I didn’t test whether the difference was due to the dongle I was using, the Apple dedicated USB dongle or the other third party option for most drives.

I should do a read/write speed test with both dongles to see if there is a difference between dongles, or I’m using slow, old drives. As I write this I’m transferring 900 gigabytes from one drive to another and it will take “about 4 hours”.

## Bring Pi

Linux reads Mac OS Journaled and APFS drives when configured. Instead of blocking a mac in time and space ato run for hours it makes sense for a Pi to do this chore. A Pi is not fast. It doesn’t matter if you’re moving files from an APFS volume to an ExFat or Ext4 drive.

## Legacy Devices

Over the years I have had USB A, B and C devices with various adapters. I have also had Firewire 400 and 800 drives, as well as Thunderbolt 2. The firewire drives and Thunderbolt two drives become unusable due to the move away from one standard to another. Luckily drives often come with two or three standards, and the aim should be to migrate from old drives to new drives every few years. Old drives can be backups, and new drives can be the working, drives, until they are retired to backup status in turn.

## And Finally

In the good old days I would plug my drives straight into the computer and move data between drives. Now that I need to go from drive, to USB-C cable to dongle, to computer, between two or more drives I find that transfer speeds are very slow and I suspect that it’s the third party USB-C dongle that is slowing things down. Tomorrow I can recover my second dongle and test to see whether my suspicion is correct or not.