Hard drive speeds and Thunderbolt

Just be aware that peak throughput and real world performance are not necessarily the same.

If your IO is not sequential (i.e., a few BIG files, rather than many small files) you won't see anywhere near the peak throughput stats due to the 7200 rpm drive's seek time vs an SSD.

throAU said:

Just be aware that peak throughput and real world performance are not necessarily the same.

If your IO is not sequential (i.e., a few BIG files, rather than many small files) you won't see anywhere near the peak throughput stats due to the 7200 rpm drive's seek time vs an SSD.

Click to expand...

I know, but my target is 120MBS, if that can be achieved consistently I'm happy...Anything above that is a bonus...

mzjin said:

Thunderbolt storage solutions are only useful with SSDs. Otherwise, mechanical HDs can't read/write fast enough to saturate TB.

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That is wrong on so many levels. Or perhaps you just worded it badly?

Given that no current Mac supports USB3 or esata, prior to Thunderbolt you were stuck with USB2 or FireWire. A hard disk enclosure connected by USB2 tops out at around 40mb/s. Same disk in a TB enclosure may well deliver 100MB/s+. I'd call that "useful".

Chippy99 said:

That is wrong on so many levels. Or perhaps you just worded it badly?

Given that no current Mac supports USB3 or esata, prior to Thunderbolt you were stuck with USB2 or FireWire. A hard disk enclosure connected by USB2 tops out at around 40mb/s. Same disk in a TB enclosure may well deliver 100MB/s+. I'd call that "useful".

Click to expand...

So true. My Pegasus R6 reaches speeds around 500 - 550MB/s with mechanical drives.

Raptor Drives

WD Raptor 10K RPM drives are another option... I have yes to test them through my LaCie eSATA/TB Hub, but will report... As far as Mechanical HDD are concerned (At reasonable prices), these are very fast drives and Made my old G5 Quad double in speed.
I am more concerned about speed because of RENDERING.. i bought a iMac i7 Quad about 5 months ago and am working of how to MAXIMIZE rendering processing. You know... time is money! As it is, I am getting around 117 MB/sec with two Accomdata 1TB eSATA drives and was hoping for at lease 125MB/Sec. through this HUB. Going to try the Raptor drives next.

Hi Everyone,

Thx for this interesting thread.

I have an 09 imac i5 2.66 FW out. I bought 2 owc mercury elite pro xternal HD as the oxford chips approved by avid for protools. I m also using Universal Audio apollo quad as interface: all daisy chained FW 800.

Th Apollo will have a TB card this summer.

I bump into some FW bandwidth problems sometimes.

As my imac doesn't have TB i need to decide what I am going to do. So if I buy a TB equiped Imac this thread indicates my current 7200 rpm drives could run at roughly 120 to double that if i went to Raid. Correct and if i added a third drive again faster ?

Am i understanding this correctly ? I am a home based singer songwriter using PTX and midi drums as the apollo can support TB and as I can get good value trading in the imac. I am thinking seriously about the i7 quad with TB and my elite pro's are only a few months old i hope to keep them and minimize expense.

Thank you.

Kcat

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but some current threads are pointing to it and this information is relative.

I did some experimenting over the weekend with a portable Thunderbolt GoFlex, USB-3 GoFlex, and a Thunderbolt "LaCie LittleBigDisk" RAID-0 2.5" hard disk ... all running from a 2012 Macbook Air (only Mac I have with a USB-3 port).

I used 2 different GoFlex hard disks, one normal and one Pro, and a Crucial M4 512GB SSD. These Seagate GoFlex TB and USB-3 interfaces are pretty cool since you can simply plug in any standard 2.5" SATA device to test, and you can purchase empty shells on eBay if you want to make it more permanent. They also have a FireWire 800 interface cable available.

There was no benefit in speed between the Thunderbolt and USB-3 interface when using either hard disk. The speed was disk I/O limited.

There was noticeable benefit in speed with the SSD when using the Thunderbolt interface.

The advantage of the Thunderbolt interface to me with hard disks is that all of my Mac computers have a Thunderbolt interface on them, but only 1 has a USB-3 port at this time.

The LaCie performed well with the RAID-0 hard disks ... but my intention is to remove the hard disks and put dual SSD drives in the Thunderbolt enclosure to use with my new iMac.

Here are some numbers:
Wr/Rd MB/s -- interface -- drive type
-------------
45 / 49 -- USB3 -- slow hard disk (5400 rpm ??)
43 / 49 -- TB -- slow hard disk

84 / 82 -- USB3 -- fast hard disk (7200 rpm ??)
83 / 82 -- TB -- fast hard disk

167 / 194 -- USB3 -- SSD
260 / 382 -- TB -- SSD

148 / 154 -- TB -- LaCie RAID-0 hard disk
? / ? -- TB -- LaCie RAID-0 SSD


The Crucial M4 SSD has 260 / 506 MB/s when on a SATA-III PCIe card in my Mac Pro. I have not tried them as Raid-0, but a pair of OWC SATA-II SSD in RAID-0 show 306 / 311 MB/s on the Mac Pro SATA-II ports.

All measurements were made with BlackMagicDesign "Disk Speed Test"



(This table will probably lose all formatting when I post it ... sorry)


-howard

Just for comparisons sake...

I have 2x 3TB WD USB3 drives attached to my 2012 Mini in a RAID0.

Ok newbie to Thunderbolt

Hey guys,

I've got a pretty quick setup here in my office:

iMac 3.4Ghz Intel i7
16Gb 1333 DDR3
SSD 256Gb HDD 1Tb

connected to a few USB 2 drives for backup/storage, I use FW800 Lacie Ruggeds for storing RAW camera files (I do lots of video editing using FCPX) and have just added a WD Thunderbolt Drive 4Gb set to RAID1.

Thought I'd do a Blackmagic Speed Test and was horrified by the results to be honest:

TB - 70Mbs
FW - 55ish Mbs

So what on earth have I got wrong with my setup that's making things operate so damn slowly. Surely I should be looking at figures of at least twice that?

Any help with my problem would be gratefully received,

Thank you!

Ben

bensouthall said:

...and have just added a WD Thunderbolt Drive 4Gb set to RAID1.

Thought I'd do a Blackmagic Speed Test and was horrified by the results to be honest:

TB - 70Mbs
FW - 55ish Mbs

So what on earth have I got wrong with my setup that's making things operate so damn slowly. Surely I should be looking at figures of at least twice that?

Click to expand...

Internet says the Duo 4G uses caviar green drives, which are 5400rpm. And you're using RAID-1 (redundancy) instead of RAID-0 (performance). I'm not sure I'm looking at the right thing, though, because it didn't have fire-wire ports.

As stated, TB won't magically improve drive speeds, it just offers much more bandwidth for data to transfer over.

Pakaku said:

Internet says the Duo 4G uses caviar green drives, which are 5400rpm. And you're using RAID-1 (redundancy) instead of RAID-0 (performance). I'm not sure I'm looking at the right thing, though, because it didn't have fire-wire ports.

As stated, TB won't magically improve drive speeds, it just offers much more bandwidth for data to transfer over.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply Pakaku,

You we're in deed looking at the right thing, I was referring to the Lacie drives when I was talking about the fire-wire ports.

So the TB is for the WD Duo 4G, and the FW for the Lacie Rugged.

The reason I've set them up as RAID1 I suppose is paranoia. I run a small video production company and want to ensure that I don't loose any of the footage I've previously stored, hence why I've duplicated my storage...just in case.

Do I really need to be as worried that something is going to go wrong with the drive and I'll loose my data? Or is there a better way to insure myself against the issue?

In order to get the faster transfer speeds, assuming I use the standard Green Drives that the WD comes with, I really need to change over to RAID0 but if I do this now they are already setup, will this simply loose what I have stored on the drive - sorry a little confused?

Ben