As far as I know, Seagate Desktop TB adapter caps the speeds around 350MB/sec for some reason so you won't get the full potential of an SSD connected to that. If you pay up and go to RAID enclosures like Lacie or Promise, you get much higher ceilings but they are for multi drives. Is there any single drive cheap TB interface which gives you full TB 1 bandwidth potential?
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Is there any TB to SATA3 single disk interface which doesn't cap speeds?
- Thread starter iBug2
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Because all my USB ports will be busy with other stuff. I'll have 6 TB ports available so I want to use them. Adding USB hubs is a bad idea, since none of them work without issues.
You aren't going to see a full TB bandwidth with any current single SSD ... the SSD data rates simply aren't that fast. The apparent 350 MB/sec "cap" on the Seagate TB adapter is probably the actual speed of the enclosed SSD.
If you use a multi-drive TB enclosure, you can run 2 or 4 SSDs as a striped RAID-0 which will start to stress the TB interface speed. I use LaCie "Little Big Disk" Thunderbolt enclosures with 2 SSDs, and I also use a Promise J4 which holds 4 drives. With both of these Thunderbolt enclosures, the drives appear as separate drives to OS X and you use DiskUtility to RAID them together. Note: the Promise J4 requires a driver which precludes being able to boot OS X (or Windows) from the external drive, but I use them for data only, using the internal drive for booting.
-howard
There were some discussions here about the portable bus-powered Seagate GoFlex "bricking" larger SSDs (>256GB) and it was pointed out that Seagate only offers the GoFlex systems (portable and desktop) with hard disk drives, not SSDs, and so the firmware was probably optimized for hard disk characteristics and may not perform as well with fast SSDs.
BTW: I had 2 different portable GoFlex TB adapters "brick" 2 512GB M4 SSD drives, probably a power issue with the bus-powered interface, since there were no reports of the desktop interface having any such problems.
A similar situation arose around the LaCie "Little Big Disk" Thunderbolt enclosure. Many of us purchased "refurb" Little Big Disk drives and then removed the hard disks and replaced them with a pair of SSDs which were then configured in RAID-0. Although the performance was pretty good, it wasn't as good as others were seeing who had purchased the very expensive new SSD versions of the Little Big Disk. A LaCie rep posted a "suggestion" that the firmware was different for the two drives to match the performance characteristics of hard disk vs. SSDs. Therefore, putting SSDs in the hard disk units wouldn't realize the best performance possible.
-howard
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