Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Hands-On Video of LaCie Little Big Disk SSD With Thunderbolt

I would like an external TB enclosure that I can put a SATA drive in. SSD has two major problems for me and I suspect many other people:

1. Cost
2. Size

I use a number of 3 TB external drive enclosures for work and personal use which there is no SSD available. Of course, if there was a 3 TB SSD it would be something only Steve Jobs could afford.

I would like to see a large capacity SATA Drive (SATA/6 would be nice) so that I could backup large amounts of files. There are many, many USB 3.0 Backup Solutions and I'm worried about TB becoming the next FW.

I hope -if nothing else- I can get a USB3 to TB converter so I have access to the wide range of USB3 Backup Solutions.


-P
 
Pentad said:
I would like an external TB enclosure that I can put a SATA drive in. SSD has two major problems for me and I suspect many other people:

1. Cost
2. Size

I use a number of 3 TB external drive enclosures for work and personal use which there is no SSD available. Of course, if there was a 3 TB SSD it would be something only Steve Jobs could afford.

I would like to see a large capacity SATA Drive (SATA/6 would be nice) so that I could backup large amounts of files. There are many, many USB 3.0 Backup Solutions and I'm worried about TB becoming the next FW.

I hope -if nothing else- I can get a USB3 to TB converter so I have access to the wide range of USB3 Backup Solutions.


-P
Click to expand...

+1 an external ssd is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. People buy external drives for storage. 260GB just isn't gonna to cut it for an external hdd. Couldn't you buy an OCZ Vertex 3 for a fraction of the price and put it in a 2.5" hdd enclosure with a thunderbolt connection?
 
Prodo123 said:
Vertex 3 offers 500Megabit per second (Mbps), not 500Megabyte(MB/s). Huge difference between the two.
800MB/s equate to 6400Mbit/s, or roughly 6.5 Gbps. Compare that to Vertex 3's 400Mbps write, or 0.4 Gbps. Even on random reads from Vertex 3, which can go up to 500Mbps,this is around 13 times faster.
This is generations ahead. *drools* It's already faster than USB 3.0's theoretical, impractical top speed of 5Gbps!!
Click to expand...

Nope, the Vertex 3 figure IS megabytes (MB) not megabits (Mb). They're insanely fast. I have two Vertex 3s in (software) RAID0 and I get over 700 megabytes per second read performance.
 
Prodo123 said:
Vertex 3 offers 500Megabit per second (Mbps), not 500Megabyte(MB/s). Huge difference between the two.
Click to expand...

There is certainly a huge difference between megabits and megabytes; it's very important not to confuse the two. Unfortunately, you confused them.

Here's a link to some performance testing graphs; all results are in megabytes per second, but the graphs also specify the speed of the SATA link involved--either 3 or 6 gigabits per second. You'll notice that sequential read speeds hover around 400 megabytes per second.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4341/ocz-vertex-3-max-iops-patriot-wildfire-ssds-reviewed/4

Sequential reads on a spinning hard drive are in the 100-150 megabyte per second range. A single drive can saturate a gigabit ethernet connection, which has a theoretical bandwidth of 128 megabytes per second. SSDs can saturate a SATAII link, which is 3 gigabits per second. That's why the newer SSDs support SATAIII, which is six gigabits per second.

Personally, I'd love to see a 10GigE Thunderbolt adaptor; I'm not holding my breath.

Apropos of nothing, one of my favorite aphorisms is "better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."

Cheers,

Jason
 
So is it not possible to do a hub set up when you are using Thunderbolt architecture? What if I wanted to remove one of the drives? I would have to temporarily disconnect the monitor?
 
adambadamh said:
So is it not possible to do a hub set up when you are using Thunderbolt architecture? What if I wanted to remove one of the drives? I would have to temporarily disconnect the monitor?
Click to expand...

Even worse - if you had more than one drive in the daisy chain, you'd have to dismount ("umount", "offline" or whatever syntax your OS uses for the procedure to remove a volume(s)) any disks in the chain after the one you intend to unplug.

It could be worse than that - I'm assuming that breaking the daisy chain "after" device "X" does not affect device "X" and any devices in the chain before "X". I don't know if that assumption is correct. (Note that SCSI was a daisy-chained technology, and disconnecting any part of the bus could have catastrophic effects on the integrity of your data.)

Until TBolt devices actually ship, and people see how they perform, it may be prudent to do a full shutdown of your system before adding/removing cables.
 
Prodo123 said:
Vertex 3 offers 500Megabit per second (Mbps), not 500Megabyte(MB/s). Huge difference between the two.
800MB/s equate to 6400Mbit/s, or roughly 6.5 Gbps. Compare that to Vertex 3's 400Mbps write, or 0.4 Gbps. Even on random reads from Vertex 3, which can go up to 500Mbps,this is around 13 times faster.
This is generations ahead. *drools* It's already faster than USB 3.0's theoretical, impractical top speed of 5Gbps!!
Click to expand...

Hahahahahahaha ... Now you may tried to correct someone, but your mistake is quite laughable. Vertex3 indeed promise 500MB/s read write speed. While traditional hdd (w/sata) can read up to approx. 100MB/s

500Mbps is relatively SLOW for ssd. Meaning you only get around 64MBps read/write. Please correct it, if u have the time of course
 
Prodo123 said:
I would KILL for a $100 8GB Thunderbolt flash drive.
Click to expand...
Until OSX supports TRIM on third-party drives, and early indications are that 10.7 doesn't, you'll waste all your time clearing dirty cells on writes. The speed of your interface will be totally wasted.
 
adambadamh said:
So is it not possible to do a hub set up when you are using Thunderbolt architecture? What if I wanted to remove one of the drives? I would have to temporarily disconnect the monitor?
Click to expand...
That's why Thunderbolt's design spec requiring monitors be last in the chain is so stupid. You have to turn off and reconnect your monitor to disconnect a drive. If the monitor were first, this usage defect doesn't happen.
 
bigwig said:
Until OSX supports TRIM on third-party drives, and early indications are that 10.7 doesn't, you'll waste all your time clearing dirty cells on writes. The speed of your interface will be totally wasted.
Click to expand...

+ to that and what is the benefit of thunderbolt already?
 
I've had 5 LaCie disks up and die on me. Not kidding. 2 bought and 3 replacements. They are terrible, terrible quality, and the people who run that company should be driven into the streets and beaten with rubber hoses.

:mad:
 
Scarrus said:
+ to that and what is the benefit of thunderbolt already?
Click to expand...

It's something that some of the newest, most expensive Apples have, and PCs don't - so it's wonderful.

;)

There's no benefit to TBolt today. You can't buy any TBolt devices, and few companies have even quoted prices for TBolt stuff. (And most of those are quoting close to $1000 or more for a TBolt device.)

Buy USB 3.0 stuff instead. Someday when Apple supports current technology you'll be happy.
 
AidenShaw said:
There's no benefit to TBolt today. You can't buy any TBolt devices, and few companies have even quoted prices for TBolt stuff. (And most of those are quoting close to $1000 or more for a TBolt device.)

Buy USB 3.0 stuff instead. Someday when Apple supports current technology you'll be happy.
Click to expand...

Thunderbolt is bad because there are no devices today, so it's better to buy a USB3 device that doesn't work on a Mac today either, and may never work at all? I'm confused. :confused:
 
admanimal said:
Thunderbolt is bad because there are no devices today, so it's better to buy a USB3 device that doesn't work on a Mac today either, and may never work at all? I'm confused. :confused:
Click to expand...

USB 3.0 does work with a Mac but only at USB 2.0 speed.

Intel is adding native support of USB 3.0 (and Thunderbolt) to the Ivy Bridge chipset next year so hopefully we'll get it alongside TB in the 2012 Mac updates.
 
OllyW said:
That's going to be another blow against widespread Thunderbolt adoption. :(
Click to expand...

Yeah. Looks like TB will be (another) fancy interface for professionals. Native USB 3.0 support means that OEMs have no need to drive Thunderbolt as aggressively since USB 3.0 is enough for most people. If there was no USB 3.0 support in IB, then OEMs might have harder time choosing between USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt (both would require a discrete chip).
 
It really can't be emphasized enough how awful it is that the monitor has to be the last link in the daisy chain. Losing your external screen everytime you need to add or subtract Thunderbolt items is absolutely terrible. Bunch of engineering nerds designing things terribly at catastrophic functionality cost for a slight boost in specs. Just clueless.

The 32 Gbps PCI Express external cable standard can't come out soon enough. DisplayPort 1.2 also has twice the display bandwidth as Thunderbolt.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

825 is impressive since that's above what USB 3 is capable of (600MB/s theoretical) but I'd really like to see something like a 5 bay drive that was capable of 1200+ to prove TB's external storage chops... Better yet monsterously huge DAS using HD capable of 1GB/s

People seem to want to see a 2.5" single portable hard drive hooked up via TB, I wonder if these people understand where the bottle necks actually are.
 
jb510 said:

People seem to want to see a 2.5" single portable hard drive hooked up via TB, I wonder if these people understand where the bottle necks actually are.
Click to expand...

I think most here wants a SSD connected via TB not a 2.5" hard drive. If they want a hard drive, i't would probably be to replace a slow USB 2.0 drive, not a expensive FW800 drive.
 
An external enclosure to attach PCI-E cards - especially GPUs to the iMac would be insanely useful. Where are those devices?

Anyways, Thunderbolt is a dud - we'll be lucky to see a single device come out for this port.

Apple should really refund us some money on these useless ports :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back