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External Hard Drive Enclosure for Thunderbolt

Kritzmire

Kritzmire

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 27, 2014
38
0
W

waw74

macrumors 601
May 27, 2008
4,683
949
for a single drive, USB3 will give you about the same performance as thunderbolt, and will be cheaper and easier to find. (some great sales on them this weekend)
The limiting factor here, is the speed of the drive itself.

If you go RAID or SSD, you may see some speed gain with going thunderbolt. depending on the speed of the disk.
 
matreya

matreya

macrumors 65816
Nov 14, 2009
1,286
127
Kritzmire said:
I just received my RiMac and didn't think that my external drive runs on firewire. The iMac only has two thunderbolt ports :(
I debated buying this:
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD464ZM/A/apple-thunderbolt-to-firewire-adapter?fnode=51

I may have a USB cable somewhere I can use to backup with for now, but at some point I'd like to just get a thunderbolt enclosure for my current external drive. Can anyone recommend me one?
Click to expand...

There are currently NO single 3.5 inch drive enclosures with Thunderbolt. You can get LaCie external drives with Thunderbolt but they only have a single thunderbolt port, which means you would have to put them at the end of any thunderbolt daisy chain.

You *could* pull the drive from your current firewire enclosure and put it into something like this:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/METB7DK0GB/

and put another drive into the 2nd bay so you have two backup drives...

Your cheapest option is to just get the thunderbolt to firewire adapter... I have one I've been using since May 2013 without any problems. Of course, you are then limited to the speed of firewire 800. With a proper thunderbolt enclosure, you'll get closer to 150/180MB/sec per drive.
 
Kritzmire

Kritzmire

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 27, 2014
38
0
matreya said:
There are currently NO single 3.5 inch drive enclosures with Thunderbolt. You can get LaCie external drives with Thunderbolt but they only have a single thunderbolt port, which means you would have to put them at the end of any thunderbolt daisy chain.

You *could* pull the drive from your current firewire enclosure and put it into something like this:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/METB7DK0GB/

and put another drive into the 2nd bay so you have two backup drives...

Your cheapest option is to just get the thunderbolt to firewire adapter... I have one I've been using since May 2013 without any problems. Of course, you are then limited to the speed of firewire 800. With a proper thunderbolt enclosure, you'll get closer to 150/180MB/sec per drive.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I think I may just get an adapter for now.
I don't mind speed as I use this as a time-machine backup, and generally just back it up once a week while I'm not using my computer.
In the future I will probably get an enclosure for my hd that is just thunderbolt.
 
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