Buffalo MiniStation, what performance?

Hello all,

I was looking at Buffalo's MiniStation, hoping it would replace a FireWire 800-based drive for virtual machine's hard disk hosting, but then I looked at their performance rate, and it is barely above the ones for FireWire800.

Is it because it is a first-generation device, or simply that Thunderbolt is a great hype and nothing more?

 

Lots of confusion here!
For the numbers at hands, Mb = megabits, MB = megabytes, so 1MB = 8Mb.

FireWire 800 HDD actually top out around 90MB/s, and the MiniStation is rated for 110MB/s max. An improvement, but a small one. Enough to justify choosing TB when shopping around for the new, but not enough to replace a FW800 drive.

SATAI would have been 150MB/s, but these older drives have been phased out (they didn't support NCQ), mostly, in favor of SATAII, for 300MB/s (3Gb/s). So FW800 is clearly a bottleneck when coupled to a SATAII drive.

I still don't understand how a modern SATA II drive wouldn't do better plugged in ThunderBolt than a first-generation SATA I drive. Is Buffalo putting older drives in its TB enclosures? Virtual machines access's main bottleneck is throughput, on par with lengthy seek times (a few ms times thousands of access WILL slow down the machine).

 

USB 2.0 performance is reputedly poor compared to FW800, and for this reason exactly, I selected a 7200rpm drive mechanism with a FW800 interface, before TB was introduced.

Should I understand that, even with a SATAII interface, the drive inside wouldn't be able to perform much better than its SATAI counterpart?

 

Does it means that there is no NCQ-enabled drives in 2.5" form factor yet? It would have improved seek times by a great deal in my application, if I am not mistaken. In the meantime, there is always RAID-0, but no RAID-0 TB drive seem to exist at the moment in 2.5" form factor.

I have more than 400GB worth of virtual machines. This doesn't mean I have tons of OSes, but rather that I am taking snapshots before major changes, and for debugging purposes.

This would make the matching drive unaffordable, alas, while the 256GB SSD is already extremely expensive at more than $400.

Installing a 256GB SSD in the MBP wouldn't be so useful in itself, as it would have to rely even more heavily on external storage.

Truth is, SSDs are lightning fast, but how does it translate in real-world situation as a system drive, where I would be typing in, say, a browser window, reading PDFs or editing documents while listening to music and of course, the low-intensity downloads in the background? Only occasionally I wish the MBP was faster.

The only I/O intensive application I can think of at the moment are virtual machines, that have the undesirable effect (for an SSD) to require large capacities.

 

Link please.

 

I can't tell for the Hitachi drive. I assume it is the one present in this G-Drive FW800, but spends a lot of time seeking when running multiple virtual machines.

The 256GB Thunderbolt SSD described by Ifti is $400. The one you linked to is unavailable. Here, it costs upwards of $300 and yes, I do account for taxes and shipping. (link) (link)

I don't want to replace a drive I am regularly using for to create bootable discs, and will only consider replacing the optical as the last option. Plus, it would consume more power overall with that upgrade.

Indeed the Hitachi Travelstar 7K1000 would be a very interesting upgrade since it is more performant, but then again, is it really the best platter-based HDD in 2.5" form?

It wasn't available when the MBP was bought, however, and I am still somewhat reluctant to Hitachi or other Asian-designed HDD since I have a history of premature breaks with almost all of those I used.

Would it really be more performant in a Fusion setup as VMs are not exactly frequently used, so caching often-used blocks may not improve things in that regard?

Even given that, it would make a pretty expensive upgrade:
256 GB SSD: 300$
1TB HDD: 100$
Data doubler: $50
External enclosure for the optical drive: $20

Of course, I can cut on these if I can sell the used drives, but nobody seems to be willing to buy such drives. I have been selling rarely-used drives for the past half year, not a single interested buyer.