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15" Retina Ideal External Setup

C

camjones1708

macrumors newbie
Original poster
I'm heading to college and do not want to take my desktop this year as I just got a new retina macbook pro. The only problem is I just got two new hard drives for my desktop so I want to bring them with me. If I get two enclosures then that will use up both usb and I will not be able to plug in my mouse when I dock. This is where the problem lies. My ideal solution is to be as cost efficient as possible, while providing ports for everything and not bottle-necking performance.

I understand that thunderbolt would provide another port but I cannot find a thunderbolt external enclosure as they are extremely expensive. Ideally my set up would be my 256 gb SSD in a thunderbolt enclosure and then the 2 tb hdd in a 3.0 hard drive because to my understanding 7200rpm does not max out 3.0. Thus allowing my mouse and printer to not bring down the speeds on the hdd. Would this be the ideal setup? Or would it be better to get a usb 3.0 Hub. From what I've read it seems that there is only one usb controller anyways. Thanks in advance!=]

Luckily it does have a hdmi port so I'll be able to connect without an adapter for that!
 
Just get a USB 3.0 hub. It should be a great and inexpensive solution for your problem. I have a 7-port hub which serves as my "docking station". I have three hard drives, a blu-ray drive and a gigabit ethernet adapter connected to my hub.

That way, you will still have the Thunderbolt ports available for displays, which is still pretty much the only thing that Thunderbolt is good for.
 
I already have a usb 2.0 hub from monoprice so I can use that for my mouse and printer and I wasn't worried about those limiting the speeds but you don't believe that two hard drives on the same usb 3.0 controller will slow down performance?
 
KevinC867 said:
I have a 7-port hub which serves as my "docking station". I have three hard drives, a blu-ray drive and a gigabit ethernet adapter connected to my hub.
Click to expand...

Are all 7 ports USB3? if I recal correctly these are 3 or 4 USB3 and the balance USB 2, if that makes a difference to the OP

If your HDs are bus powered, more than ~2 on a hub could be an issue.

I've had sleep and HD issues with many USB3 hubs. The belkin 4 port sold by apple seems to be one of a few with fully functioning firmware so it can handle multiple hard drives connected to a MAC.

OP, USB3 has separate read an write lanes, so you could be reading from one drive at full rate, while writing to the other at full rate. What would you be doing that accesses both external drives at the same time?

I have a SSD and Rotational USB3 drives connected to the hub and then to the rMBP. I can run blackmagic on both and don't see a big hit, but that may just be because the rotational maxes out at 110MBps.
 
ColdCase said:
Are all 7 ports USB3? if I recal correctly these are 3 or 4 USB3 and the balance USB 2, if that makes a difference to the OP

If your HDs are bus powered, more than ~2 on a hub could be an issue.

I've had sleep and HD issues with many USB3 hubs. The belkin 4 port sold by apple seems to be one of a few with fully functioning firmware so it can handle multiple hard drives connected to a MAC.

...
Click to expand...

I have the Plugable 7-port USB 3.0 hub (www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008ZGKWQI/). All seven ports are USB 3.0. It comes with a substantial 4 Amp power supply, so a bunch of bus powered devices should not be a problem.

I had some problems early on with sleep issues and the hub not being recognized as USB 3.0. However, I think these were Apple software problems and they have since been fixed with later revisions to Mountain Lion.
 
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Actually hubs had firmware issues (not compliant with the standards) and because PCs didn't use those features (or stubbed them out), they did not seem to be a problem. Thats not unusual for the cheap and quick to market type consumer product environment. Notice that pluggable suggests using the more expensive aluminum model with modern MACs as the firmware has been corrected. The new FW probably now works with older MAC software.

This forum is full of pluggable USB hub issues, which may have been corrected by now. Awhile back they admitted that the issues were all firmware related and not the mac side, although folks here may continue to think there were significant MAC issues. I think pluggable is trying to build a good product.
 
I have the USB3 hub available from my local Apple Store and it works fine.

As for two HDDs taking up "all" the bandwidth, keep in mind most HDDs will max out at around 100MB/sec and USB3 is 5Gb/sec. In reality you'll probably max out at between 3-4Gb/sec which is 375MB/sec to 500MB/sec, more than enough to support two HDDs with room left over.
 
I got a toshiba dynadock. It has 4 usb 3.0 ports (two are "powered") two usb 2.0 ports, gigabit ethernet, dvi, hdmi and some audio outputs (which i dont think work under osx).
 
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