Blackmagic Multidock 2 - External BootCamp SSD

[Alexis1537]

Folks,

I won't be posting anything as detailed as propower did recently on this thread. This is just a short post to let you know that the Multidock 2 can be used very easily as an external Thunderbolt SSD drive for a Bootcamp installation (provided your Mac is EFI 2.0 compatible, as is the nMP).

Performance is very good indeed so far. - at least from an "experience" point of view. Quick BlackMagic speed test of the drive under OSX (before I loaded it up with my migrated Bootcamp installation) revealed around 390ish Mbps read/write speeds which is less than I thought they would be. I need to work out what I'm doing wrong, if anything. No test done yet under Windows 8.1, but I'm not expecting anything wildly different.

Stay tuned for a more detailed analysis once I've put it through its passes properly.

Thanks,
Alex

 

[matreya]

Quick BlackMagic speed test of the drive under OSX (before I loaded it up with my migrated Bootcamp installation) revealed around 390ish Mbps read/write speeds which is less than I thought they would be. I need to work out what I'm doing wrong, if anything. No test done yet under Windows 8.1, but I'm not expecting anything wildly different.

You're not doing anything wrong from what I can see, Blackmagic aren't really boasting particularly fast speeds on their product page (RAID 0 x 4 SSDs @ >500MB/sec is pretty ordinary to say the least)

I get faster speeds than that from my Thunderbay (OWC) using 4 x 2TB hard drives..

Also, I have two SSDs in RAID 0 in an Akitio enclosure and get just over 700MB/sec reads from it...

 

[Alexis1537]

You're not doing anything wrong from what I can see, Blackmagic aren't really boasting particularly fast speeds on their product page (RAID 0 x 4 SSDs @ >500MB/sec is pretty ordinary to say the least)

I get faster speeds than that from my Thunderbay (OWC) using 4 x 2TB hard drives..

Also, I have two SSDs in RAID 0 in an Akitio enclosure and get just over 700MB/sec reads from it...

Thanks matreya, that's a useful insight. I will dig into this a bit more now that my config is settled and the (self-inflicted) bootcamp nightmares are over with.

To be perfectly transparent, the speeds I'm getting, while not setting the world on fire, are so far ahead of what I used to have that I'm still enjoying every minute of the Multidock 2/nMP combo.

Take care,
Alex

 

[treestar]

Here are the results of my test on the Blackmagic MultiDock 2:

1 x Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250 GB
Write: 347 MB/s
Read: 382 MB/s

2 x Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250 GB RAID 0
Write: 638 MB/s
Read: 694 MB/s

2 x Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250 GB RAID 1
Write: 332 MB/s
Read: 665 MB/s


Lastly, an internal speed test (Note, AJA System Test will not write to the system drive).

1 x Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250 GB
Read: 445 MB/s


I don't know why the MultiDock single drive interface is remarkably slower. The Samsung SSD 850 EVO is specified at a sequential write speed of 520 MB/s and a sequential read speed of 550 MB/s. System Profiler verifies a 6 Gb/s link speed, but 382 MB/s is near the SATA II spec' of 3 Gb/s.