Is there any point in paying extra for this HDD with Thunderbolt?

[gwelmarten]

Hi
So, I was looking at the Western Digital My Book Studio 2 in the 6TB form (see here), when I saw they make a thunderbolt version (see here).

So, I can't see why I would pay at extra $200 for this. The non-thunderbolt version has USB 2.0, which has read/write speeds of about 480Mbps (correct?).
The hard drives in there (because they are SATA, physical hard drives with moving parts) are limited to around 40Mb/s. So surely USB 2.0 is capable of moving data faster than the drives can read/write, so there is no need for anything faster?

Doesn't this therefore mean that putting thunderbolt into a product like this is pointless, as it will work at exactly the same speed as the USB version, limited by the HDD speed?

Or am I missing something?

Thanks for your comments,

Sam

 

[jmcgeejr]

Hi
So, I was looking at the Western Digital My Book Studio 2 in the 6TB form (see here), when I saw they make a thunderbolt version (see here).

So, I can't see why I would pay at extra $200 for this. The non-thunderbolt version has USB 2.0, which has read/write speeds of about 480Mbps (correct?).
The hard drives in there (because they are SATA, physical hard drives with moving parts) are limited to around 40Mb/s. So surely USB 2.0 is capable of moving data faster than the drives can read/write, so there is no need for anything faster?

Doesn't this therefore mean that putting thunderbolt into a product like this is pointless, as it will work at exactly the same speed as the USB version, limited by the HDD speed?

Or am I missing something?

Thanks for your comments,

Sam

USB 2.0 is much slower than the 480Mbps it says, with overhead and such you are lucky to get about 25MB/s, I ended up going with firewire800, high bandwith and less overhead, I get about 55MB/s with that. Avoid 2.0 if you can mate it's so slow.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Normal modern 3.5" (desktop) HDDs can deliver up to 130 MB/s when connected via S-ATA interface. USB 2.0 limits the transfer to 37 MB/s.
Since that model you linked to has two actual HDDs, you can employ RAID on them and stripe data onto two HDDs, thus getting 250 MB/s, thus Thunderbolt is quite helpful.
But then again, with RAID in striping mode (splitting data onto two ore more HDDs), you need to employ a proper backup system, as when one HDD fails, all data is lost.

 

[gwelmarten]

Normal modern 3.5" (desktop) HDDs can deliver up to 130 MB/s when connected via S-ATA interface. USB 2.0 limits the transfer to 37 MB/s.
Since that model you linked to has two actual HDDs, you can employ RAID on them and stripe data onto two HDDs, thus getting 250 MB/s, thus Thunderbolt is quite helpful.
But then again, with RAID in striping mode (splitting data onto two ore more HDDs), you need to employ a proper backup system, as when one HDD fails, all data is lost.

Thanks for that.
As I want to use it in mirroring mode (so if one HDD fails, the other will still have the data), is what you are saying that USB 2 would work around 37Mb/s and if I were to have thunderbolt, it would be 125Mb/s?

Do you know anything about the Western Digital Caviar Green drives being bad in a RAID array because they 'spin down'?

Sam