Thunderbolt is very fast on OS X, but do we get the same speed when accessing Thunderbolt devices through boot camp? Meaning, if I wanted to install Steam games from my Boot Camp partition onto a Thunderbolt drive instead of on the partition itself, would I see any deterioration in quality?
Thunderbolt speed via bootcamp
bootcampgamesthunderbolt
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Best Answer
Since the Thunderbolt drives can run 10 up to 20 Gbps that is much faster than the internal drive in many cases.
I do not see a problem, but can not speak for the boot camp it self.
Here are some numbers:
SSDs itself will have the same speed of reading and writing no matter the cable. The TYPE of cable/connection decides if it can sustain that speed, and this is equally true with USB 3.0, eSATA (v2/3) and TB1/2 - all of them have wide enough bandwidth to support high-speed transfer rates that SSDs are capable of.
USB 3.0 up to 5 Gbits/s (525 MB/s)
eSATA 2 up to 3 Gbits/s (300 MB/s)
eSATA 3 up to 6 Gbits/s (600 MB/s)
TB1 up to 10 Gbits/s per channel (1050 MB/s)
TB2 up to 20 Gbits/s aggregated channels (2100 MB/s)
In summary, those numbers would say the Boot camp would run as fast or faster via Thunderbolt cable to SSD drive.