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Seagate Thunderbolt Adapter with my old Lacie drives?

J

Jamooche

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 23, 2011
204
55
I just watched this video about the Seagate Thunderbolt Adapter for hard drives:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA_VVDbmCq4&list=FLzMjN2man2RMEN8Wem6BGhA

It not only works with their drives, but also with any SATA drive. I need a faster external solution but already have 3 1TB Lacie D2 Quadra USB2 / Firewire 800 drives.

What I'm thinking is to take apart the Lacie enclosures and use them with the new Thunderbolt adapter. Seems pretty simple. What are people's thoughts on this? Am I missing something, or is it really that simple for me to speed up my existing storage drives?

Thanks!
 
B

bonedaddio

macrumors member
Jan 23, 2009
63
0
PA, USA
To some extent it will depend on the speed of your (current) drives.

The Seagate Backup Plus Desktop adapter has a Sata III (6Gb/s) bus connector. It'll work with Sata II (3Gb/s), but you want to use Sata III drives to really get what it's capable of. I'm guessing your older hard drives are Sata II??

You'll see a significant improvement with Sata III HDDs, and way faster improvements with a Sata III SSD. I've got some Black Magic disk speed tests posted over on another forum (MacBook Pro, I think).

Les
 
G

g4cube

macrumors 6502a
Apr 22, 2003
760
13
bonedaddio said:
To some extent it will depend on the speed of your (current) drives.

The Seagate Backup Plus Desktop adapter has a Sata III (6Gb/s) bus connector. It'll work with Sata II (3Gb/s), but you want to use Sata III drives to really get what it's capable of. I'm guessing your older hard drives are Sata II??

You'll see a significant improvement with Sata III HDDs, and way faster improvements with a Sata III SSD. I've got some Black Magic disk speed tests posted over on another forum (MacBook Pro, I think).

Les
Click to expand...

Whether SATA II or SATA III, you really are limited by the actuall HDD mechanism which won't even make full use of a SATA II connection. I predict the performance limiting factor is the HDD thruput speed itself; Somewhere between 80-110MB/sec if the drive is 2 or 3 years old.

Check the model number of the bare drive, and look up the specs for the HDD mechanism itself to give you a rough idea.
 
J

Jamooche

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 23, 2011
204
55
Thanks. Will look up the drive specs. Ordered the thunderbolt hub. Will be much faster than what I have now.
 
J

Jamooche

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 23, 2011
204
55
Update on this idea: I have taken apart my 4 older hard drives to remove the internal drives. I did speed tests before and after using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test program. All the old drives were SATA 3.

My old slowest drive, a 2.5" HDD from a portable USB 2.0 enclosure is now my fastest of these drives. The other 3 drives were from Lacie D2 Quadra enclosures all of which had three different HDD manufactures inside.

I bought some cheap anti-static bags off Amazon for them and have plastic container with bubble wrap to keep them safe.

Bottom line is that it's more than doubled the speed of the HDDs going from Firewire 800 to Thunderbolt.
 
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