Confused about Types of Hard Drive Connections

Hi

I'm about to purchase some new drives and I was wondering if I should give consideration to the type of connection the drives use. I know there are USB, thunderbolt 1 to 3, lightening bolt etc.

What are the practical differences between the different types of connections?

Are there certain types of connections I should look for or certain ones I should avoid?

If you are wondering what the purposes of these drives will be, I intend on using one of them to do time machine backups of my iMac. I will probably use another one to do more manual backup stuff and transfers between machines.

Also, would 2TB Western Digital drives be recommended?

Thanks for the help

Thanks but what are the purposes of the other connection types and what are the differences between them?

Thunderbolt is the quickest connection type. Makes a lot of sense when using SSD drives because it can use their full throughput.

On the Windows PC side, USB-C is not always equal to Thunderbolt 3, which is the latest and fastest. They use the port, but not the speed to make it cheaper. Typical.

Apple implements Thunderbolt 3 on all their USB-C ports.

Sometimes you can only use Thunderbolt and SSD drives for heavy-duty video stuff.

For audio USB 3 is good enough if you're not recording at 192k sample rate.

If you're using a spinning drive for audio, make sure it's 7200 rpm.

For backup purposes 5400 rpm drives are ok.

Never use USB 2.0 external drives for recording, it's not fast enough. Backup is ok, just slower.