Fastest Thundebolt drive.

[Tajee]

What do you recommend for an external Thunderbolt drive for an iMac. I'm looking for 2GB +.

The WD true Thunderbolt & the Seagate w/adapter seem very slow.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Since only HDDs offer a capacity of 2 TB, you are limited to those, and HDDs have read write speeds of around 100 MB/s (some more, some less), thus maybe a Firewire 800 or Gigabit Ethernet / LAN HDD could suffice, as it is cheaper than a Thunderbolt HDD.

And what do you mean with "The WD true Thunderbolt & the Seagate w/adapter seem very slow"? What numbers do you refer to? Link?

 

[wessew]

Not true! Here are two examples, both RAID: 1) Lacie 2 Big 4 Tb for $599. Connection speeds of over 300 mbs. 2) Promise Pegasis RAID 4 Tb for $1,029 with faster connection speeds. Both units use 7200 hard drives. The more drives the faster the speed. If you are thinking about using one of these, make sure you maintain a backup.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Not true! Here are two examples, both RAID: 1) Lacie 2 Big 4 Tb for $599. Connection speeds of over 300 mbs. 2) Promise Pegasis RAID 4 Tb for $1,029 with faster connection speeds. Both units use 7200 hard drives. The more drives the faster the speed. If you are thinking about using one of these, make sure you maintain a backup.

Yes, I know about RAID. I doubt the OP wants to go into RAID territory for using two 1 TB or four 500 GB HDD to get a striped RAID, just so one can have 300 or more MB/s write and read speeds, which aren't doing anything if the iMac has an HDD and not an SSD.

 

[theSeb]

The Lacie 2Big offers the best bang for the money and is faster than the equivalent WD 2 drive unit.

 

[WesCole]

HDDs will only be as fast as the drive itself over Thunderbolt...which has already been mentioned.

However, the SeaGate Thunderbolt adapter is capable of really fast speeds. For example, my SSD in a Seagate connected via Thunderbolt has write times >350MB/sec and read >360MB/sec.

Plugging in a regular HDD via Thunderbolt will be just as fast as if you hooked it up inside the computer.

 

[joe-h2o]

People also seem to forget that these blazing fast interfaces are also constrained by the source media too - if you're copying to you hyper-fast Pegasus TB raid from your internal iMac hard drive the bottleneck certainly isn't the TB or the external.

What do you need a 2TB external for? Thunderbolt might not be what you need.

 

[philipma1957]

People also seem to forget that these blazing fast interfaces are also constrained by the source media too - if you're copying to you hyper-fast Pegasus TB raid from your internal iMac hard drive the bottleneck certainly isn't the TB or the external.

What do you need a 2TB external for? Thunderbolt might not be what you need.

yes he could use a firewire 800 as long as he is not looking to boot he won't need the thunderbolt .

I have done a lot of testing with seagate stae121 adapter ,
promise pegasus r6 and lacie little big disks.

I can tell you this thunderbolt is great for external ssd booting. My mac mini uses a pair of lacie little big discs running raid0 a 3 drive 768 gb boot ssd. the other slot has a 1tb for back up


this is 235 from a real seller

http://www.ebay.com/itm/LaCie-90001...ltDomain_0&hash=item3cc8e66dac#ht_1673wt_1398