Not All USB-C Cables Are the Same

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got a junk drawer or miscellaneous electronics drawer at home that’s jam packed full of cables that you picked up here and there as free inclusions with electronic products over the years.

New hard drive? Probably came with a cable. Rechargeable flashlight? Cable. And so they add up, disappearing into the drawer like a clump of black spaghetti. Then when you need one to move some photos around or back up your files, you don’t know whether you’ve grabbed one that’s only good for charging.

The bad news? There’s no reliably surefire way to tell whether your USB-C is one that can also data transfer. That’s why when you’re buying it, you need to make sure you’re buying one that is. Once it’s out of the packaging, it’s hard to tell.

ways in which you can tell

Printed on the cable itself, there may be text that reads Thunderbolt 5, the latest Apple high-speed data transfer cable, or USB 3.2, a protocol that allows for 5Gbps and 10Gbps in data transfer speeds, in first and second generations, respectively.

It’s becoming less common as braided-cloth-covered cables are growing in popularity. There’s no guarantee that if a cable is Thunderbolt 5 or USB 3.2, it’ll say so on the cable itself. When you’re buying a cable, you can read the packaging, and it should tell you.

If you’ve already got a cable (or a handful of them) and there’s no labeling on it, you can test to see how fast it can transfer data, if it can at all. Use it to connect an external hard drive or solid state drive, and then transfer some files. The file transfer status window will display the speed.

Don’t expect real-world use to reach the speeds mentioned in marketing terms, but these days a few gigabits per second is adequate. If it wallows at, say, 300Mbps, then you’ve probably got an old cable, and you should find yourself another, faster one for big data backups and file transfers, especially high-resolution photos and videos.