2 (or 3) Bay Thunderbolt Drives

[Rmafive]

Hey guys,

I'm looking to upgrade my 4TB G-Raid w/ Thunderbolt 1 to a larger capacity Thunderbolt 2 drive. I've done a good deal of research and I'm kind of stuck. I use the storage mostly for accessing photos for editing in Lightroom, so speed is pretty helpful (and I guess the files are relatively small compared to video editing).

I have been looking at the new G-Raid Removable with Thunderbolt 2. G-Tech claims the 8TB will get ~350mb/s which is nice. However, the Lacie 2Big w/ Thunderbolt 2 at 12TB looks to get over 400mb/s and is only $100 more expensive. Then I found the Caldigit T3, which unfortunately doesn't have hardware raid, but can achieve slightly higher speeds it seems.

I'm trying to find the best tradeoff between speed, fan noise, and cost. Does anyone have experiences with any of these drives? I'm especially interested in hearing about performance and fan noise of the Lacie and Caldigit.

 

[matreya]

I had a LaCie 2big Thunderbolt drive and a claim of over 400MB/sec is BS. The best it could actually do was about 350MB/sec.

The question you should be asking is: what do I get to backup those files. Because RAID0 is a risky way of storing photos, you need to have a reliable backup.

I would recommend you consider a G-RAID Studio, which is more expensive, faster and offers redundancy.

 

[Rmafive]

I had a LaCie 2big Thunderbolt drive and a claim of over 400MB/sec is BS. The best it could actually do was about 350MB/sec.

The question you should be asking is: what do I get to backup those files. Because RAID0 is a risky way of storing photos, you need to have a reliable backup.

I would recommend you consider a G-RAID Studio, which is more expensive, faster and offers redundancy.

Thanks for the reply. I've read that the Lacie's (at least the thunderbolt 1 ones) are fairly noisy, was that true with your unit?

Also, I have a separate drive for backing up my computer and all of the data on my Lightroom drive, so backups shouldn't be a problem. I think I'm starting to lean towards the G-Raid Removable with Thunderbolt 2.

 

[matreya]

Thanks for the reply. I've read that the Lacie's (at least the thunderbolt 1 ones) are fairly noisy, was that true with your unit?

It wasn't particularly noisy, but I was disappointed that it had Seagate entry-grade hard drives inside it..

 

[FireWire2]

You can try these raid boxes< i test and use in my clients. It transfer about +800MBs ~ 1200MB/s depends of the models

Eight 2.5" tray-less bay RAID - over 800MB/s transfer rate
http://www.datoptic.com/ec/portable-thunderbolt-2-eight-sata-sas-ssd-2-5-drive-raid5-6-tower.html

Eight 3.5" tray-less bay RAID - over 1000MB/s transfer rate
http://www.amazon.com/Thunderbolt-Eight-tray-less-Hardware-RAID5/dp/B00JVI2TI8/