Single External Rotating Drives Speed Wall

I often have to explain to friends and clients that no matter the connections on your SRHD (Single Rotating Hard Drive), USB 3, Thunderbolt, whatever, the read/write speed is limited by the drive itself.

See this BMD Disk Speed Test on a Thunderbolt connected 2TB LaCie Rugged portable drive. The port is capable of up to 10Gbps, 1250MB/s data transfer speed.

Lame speed due to the limitations of the hard drive itself. It has a USB-C connector as well, and the speed is exactly the same. As of today, single rotating drive won't give you anything above 130MB/s at best.

If you want more speed, you can only get it with a SSD or a Raid drive array.

As a reminder, the max speed of the various connecting protocols are tabulated below:
USB 2.0 480Mbps (60MB/s)
USB 3.0 / USB 3.1 gen1, 5Gbps (625MB/s)
eSATA 1.5Gbps (187.5MB/s), 3Gbps (375MB/s), up to 6Gbps (750MB/s)
USB 3.2 / 3.1 gen 2 / Thunderbolt v1 two channels 10Gbps (1250MB/s)
Thunderbolt v2 20Gbps (2500MB/s)
Thunderbolt v3 40Gbps (5000MB/s)

A single rotating modern drive is the limiting speed factor using all but USB 2.0 protocols. As a reminder USB 2.0 was implemented in 1996!! eSATA in 2004. Hard drives have some serious catch up to do.