Do you think it's because Lacie are using 2.5" drives? How big is the Promise
one able to take?
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LaCie Thunderbolt-Enabled Little Big Disk Available from Apple
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Do you think it's because Lacie are using 2.5" drives? How big is the Promise
one able to take?
I purchased it I plan on putting in 2 samsung 256gb ssd inside of it. I can build a 512 gb ssd for 1050 counting the cable. speed should be 425 read write with good random 4k speeds. this would make for a great boot drive. i can also buy 2 owc ssds smaller but faster getting speeds,over 600 cost 700 size 120gb
You can configure it as RAID 1 if you like, and enjoy half the capacity and performance but an increased sense of security. Also, this device is designed to fit in your purse. Not so much with the Pegasus RAID from Promise.
Just for the record here, this is a pocket RAID... 2 x 9.5mm 2.5" drives. So for everyone complaining about prices or spindle speeds, there are no 1TB 7200 RPM 2.5" drives available yet. I think the only options period at 9.5mm Z-height are the WD Scorpio Blue WD10JPVT ($134.99 at Newegg) and the Samsung Spinpoint M8 HN-M101MBB ($99.99 at Newegg). So you're looking at $200-270 for the mechanisms alone, regardless of the fact that a 2TB WD Caviar Green goes for $69.99. And as for the 500GB 7200 RPM 2.5" units in the 1TB model, while there are a lot more options for those, they're all hovering around $69.99 right now, or $140 for a brace.
That means LaCie is looking for $250 for a drive enclosure, power brick and the all important 2-port Thunderbolt controller, but you'll still need to fork over $49 more to Apple for a cable. That's a $100 premium over LaCie's already pricy quad interface model which actually comes with all the cables you might need. You can blame some of the price on the much touted Neil Poulton design, but seriously, LaCie has been milking essentially this same design for their drives for the past 8 years. Some of this of course boils down to supply and demand. If TB controllers were currently widely available, there might be some competition, but as it stands, this will be the only 2.5" TB drive enclosure on the market (when it finally gets there) and could be the only one available for a while. Which makes it really weak that there is no BYOD version, because you can bet that a fair number of the early adopters will not only shell out $399 for one of these, but then immediately pop it open, void the warranty, toss the drives that came with it and plug in a couple SSDs of their own. I cannot imagine who will purchase the SSD version unless LaCie is wiling to be 100% up front about exactly what you'll be getting for drives.
FireWire 800 has a nominal data rate of 786.43 Mb/s (98.3 MB/s). As with any protocol, there is of course some overhead. Most of the time when you see, for instance, an HD Tune plot of a fast drive connected via FW 800, the graph gets clipped at right about 75 MB/s. This is still fast enough that you wouldn't notice much impact during normal usage, even when using the interface with the fastest of spinning disks. Actually the performance would really only be impacted during large sequential reads and writes when the data is positioned near the outer edges of the platters. Random or small reads and writes wouldn't come close to making FW 800 break a sweat.
For all those bandying about numbers for the peak throughput of a modern HDD, here's some hard data. According to HD Tune, the 5th gen WD VelociRaptor 600GB can hit 87.6 - 148.6 MB/s sustained read rates as the heads move across the media, with an average transfer rate of 123.8 MB/s. The not quite released yet 4TB Seagate ST4000DX-000 posts read rates of 79.6 - 176.8 MB/s with an average of 136.6 MB/s. Write rates are a bit lower, of course: 121.9 MB/s for the VelociRaptor and 115.1 MB/s for the Seagate (although the only HD Tune plot of this drive that I've seen showed some odd clipping during the write test). So if you were in the business of buying pairs of these drives, filling one completely with data and then copying it to the other, using FW 800 would cost you an extra 51 mins (62%) in the case of the VelociRaptor, and 5 hours 8.5 minutes (53%) in the case of the Seagate. I'm going to guess that this is not a terribly common workflow though.
All of this is, of course, academic, seeing as RAID arrays can clearly perform even better than single disks, and SSDs far better still. That's why we're so eager for the proliferation of USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt. To plot the utter corner case, consider taking two of these LaCie Thunderbolt LBD's, replacing the disks with a pair of Intel SSD 510 250GB's or OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240GB's in RAID 0, and filling one array with random data. Now daisy chain the two arrays off of the Thunderbolt port on a Mac, and copy the full one to the empty one. Welcome to transfer rates in excess of 600 MB/s. Go ahead and plug a 2560x1600 30" DisplayPort panel into the end of the chain, it'll light up without slowing the transfer down at all.
Now try this with the same SSDs, but using USB 3.0 RAID enclosures, and with them both plugged into ports connected to the same USB 3.0 host controller on a PC. What are you getting for throughput? How's your CPU usage looking? Did you remember to use the latest drivers? Now let's push it even further. Daisy chain four TB LBD's full of SSD's off of the Thunderbolt port on a Mac. Start copying the 1st disk in the chain to the 3rd, and the 2nd to the 4th. Wow... we're sustaining over 1200 MB/s here. Take the same disks but in USB 3.0 enclosures and plug them into a four port USB 3.0 hub connected to a PC. Start copying in the same fashion... Not even close.
Each TB channel can manage real world throughput of just over 1000 MB/s, and peer to peer transfers are possible between devices. USB 3.0 is awesome for big, fast, cheap external storage, but if you're pushing the limits, or routinely copying between two external devices, TB is gonna be way, way faster.
think what this means to an owner of a pair of 2tb imacs one at work and one at home.
Your comments might make sense if these were the only drives and cables that will ever exist with a TB connector. They aren't. The Seagates and Western Digital consumer devices are coming shortly as well as many others. Its as if many people have never seen a new technology come along.
I've not felt gut-wrench heart broken since my first crush in Grade 9!!
There goes a full paycheque ... but at least with the $900 ish Canadian pricing the Logic Express on MBA is now feasible.
They use more drives. More spindles (all other things being equal) will increase performance.
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I don't own a thunderbolt Mac yet. Have you had an opportunity to try that test yet? If that is real world performance it is really impressive.
I picked one up to test today and completely disassembled it in about 10 minutes. It was pretty simple inside, though not very robustly put together. If I get a chance over the weekend I'll swap in a couple of SSDs for further testing.
While there is a bit of space between the two drives, there is definitely NO room for the 12mm 1TB drives.
This pricing structure is why Thunderbolt sucks. Sure, it's fast and all, but it's such a niche product now that your are paying an extreme penalty. Give Thunderbolt another year or two and hopefully the prices will drop. But in the meantime, it would have been nice to get USB 3.0 for the waaaay cheaper, but still very fast media.
I have a strong feeling that they won't be moving many of these units and there won't be much competition to drive the price down.
I have a strong feeling that they won't be moving many of these units and there won't be much competition to drive the price down.
Awesome! As far as I have gathered, you could even forget about the RAID altogether, put in an SSD and keep one HDD, or have two non-RAID SSDs.
No, my particular example was theoretical (and would require spending $3200-$6600 on drives, enclosures and cables). Anandtech did put 4 SF-2281 based SSD's in a Promise Pegasus R6 and clocked sequential reads of 1002.7 MB/s. ( http://www.anandtech.com/show/4489/promise-pegasus-r6-mac-thunderbolt-review/6 ) That's just about as much as you can squeeze out of a 10 gb/s Thunderbolt channel due to PCIe overhead on current Sandy Bridge systems which limit the TLP max payload size to 128 bytes. LaCie shows multiple TB LBD's hitting a wall at 800 MB/s for the SSD version and 782 MB/s for the HDD version. The marketing is very vague as to what the setup and testing methodology was though, so I have no idea where they came up with those numbers.
@ender21: Did you happen to notice what chips LaCie is using for the TB and SATA controllers?
Exactly, where are they and how much will they cost?
Answer, they will be expensive; and not for the "average joe". So all those owners of the new MBP, MBA, and MM's had better get ready to spend some serious coin to utilize that port they have now.
I'm not against it, cool as hell actually. But really, this thing was played way wrong by Intel and Apple.
Future proof: well see.
