HDMI isn’t used to connect drives, just monitors, so its speed is not an issue here. In terms of speed, PCIe Cable will be the champion when it ships, Thunderbolt is the winner today, and USB 3.0 is a solid second at half its speed. PCIe Cable will probably be less costly than Thunderbolt. In terms of cost, USB 3.0 and HDMI are inexpensive, while Thunderbolt is not. PCIe Cable will launch with 32 Gbps bandwidth and jump to 64 Gbps when PCI Express 4.0 becomes available. PCI Express Cable (PCIe Cable for short) basically takes the PCI Express bus and puts it on a cable, something Thunderbolt already does – but much faster than the current Thunderbolt speed. Intel, which invented Thunderbolt, says it will eventually reach 100 Gbps. It may eventually displace those VGA ports that every PC notebook seems to include to support video projectors. HDMI is becoming a popular monitor port on PCs, and all the new MacBook Pro models have it.

It is specifically designed to support high definition displays and audio, so a single HDMI cable can send video and sound to your TV. HDMI has been used to connect flat screen TVs to DVD and Blu-ray players, DVRs, computers, and more since 2003. Best of all, it’s backward compatible, so you can plug USB 3.0 devices into USB 2.0 ports and vice versa. That’s potentially half as fast as Thunderbolt at a much lower cost. USB 3.0 improves on that with over 10x the bandwidth of 2.0 plus bidirectional support, so your PC can both send and receive data at up to 5 Gbps at the same time. USB 2.0 is 40x as fast with 480 Mbps of bandwidth, which makes it great for almost everything. USB 1.1 tops out at 12 Mbps, which is fine for keyboards and mice, decent for 802.11b and g WiFi cards, adequate for printers and scanners and slow-burning CD-RW optical drives, and horribly slow for hard drives. It’s been around since 1996, although it didn’t really go anywhere until the first iMac shipped in August 1998. USB is ubiquitous and cheap to implement. It’s not an inexpensive technology, and while every Mac introduced since 2011 has it, hardly anything else does, although it looks like Acer is embracing it.

Thunderbolt supports both PCIe and video.

No, you can’t buy a Thunderbolt PCIe card. Thunderbolt is fast – so fast at 10 Gbps that it has to be built onto the system board. Here’s a brief overview of the four technologies covered in this article: Thunderbolt USB, HDMI, PCIe Cable: How Does It Compare? on Cnet, it looks like we’re going to have yet another port war in the PC world.

Firewire 800 to usb 3 cable