Lacie Thunderbolt

[police340]

Hello,

I have a Lacie Thunderbolt drive that i put two SSD's in, a 480Gb and a 240Gb and have the showing as two separate drives. I was wondering if I should combine them into one drive or keep them as separate drives. No articular reason, just didnt know what is best. Thank you for any suggestions, Bill

 

[Silverrune]

Hello,

I have a Lacie Thunderbolt drive that i put two SSD's in, a 480Gb and a 240Gb and have the showing as two separate drives. I was wondering if I should combine them into one drive or keep them as separate drives. No articular reason, just didnt know what is best. Thank you for any suggestions, Bill

I'd keep them separated, as far as I know if you raid those two capacities the most space you could possibly have is 480Gb. I don't know what else you could be talking about other than that. If you want performance over the extra 240Gb, then raid them.

 

[hfg]

You could partition the 480GB into 2 partitions of 240GB each, then RAID-0 the single 240 with one partition of the larger one to create a fast 480GB RAID-0 disk and a single 240GB disk on the remaining partition. Kind of strange, but it does work! I would only do this if the 2 disks were the same series (manufacturer and speed) of SSDs.

I once did this for a RAID-0 OS X disk and a bootable Windows disk using only 2 physical disk drives in my Mac Pro. However, I have been unable to get the external LaCie Thunderbolt "Little Big Disk" to boot Windows no matter what disk configurations I use (you don't mention which 2-drive LaCie unit you are using).
The drives I used were a 512GB and 256GB Samsung 840 Pro.

 

[g4cube]

...However, I have been unable to get the external LaCie Thunderbolt "Little Big Disk" to boot Windows no matter what disk configurations I use (you don't mention which 2-drive LaCie unit you are using).
The drives I used were a 512GB and 256GB Samsung 840 Pro.

For Windows, the LaCie drive requires a device specific driver:

http://manuals.lacie.com/en/manuals/thunderbolt-pro/windows

Not sure this will help with booting as I don't think there is anyway for the Mac firmware or Windows to load the driver first before booting the OS. I haven't tried.

 

[hfg]

For Windows, the LaCie drive requires a device specific driver:

http://manuals.lacie.com/en/manuals/thunderbolt-pro/windows

Not sure this will help with booting as I don't think there is anyway for the Mac firmware or Windows to load the driver first before booting the OS. I haven't tried.

Yeah ... that's the problem! Booting Windows on the external Thunderbolt drive.

The LaCie Thunderbolt "Rugged" drive boots Windows fine, as does the Seagate Thunderbolt Adapter. I would like to find a 2-drive enclosure which will boot Windows so as to have a Windows boot SSD and data hard disk in the same Thunderbolt enclosure. So far ... no luck.

-howard

 

[g4cube]

Did you split the RAID so LBD is 2 independent drives? Windows wouldn't know how to read the Mac formatted striped drive.

 

[hfg]

Did you split the RAID so LBD is 2 independent drives? Windows wouldn't know how to read the Mac formatted striped drive.

Yes, the disks were restored to independent drives, so Windows would be on a separate disk with no Apple SoftRaid applied.

 

[marzer]

Hello,

I have a Lacie Thunderbolt drive that i put two SSD's in, a 480Gb and a 240Gb and have the showing as two separate drives. I was wondering if I should combine them into one drive or keep them as separate drives. No articular reason, just didnt know what is best. Thank you for any suggestions, Bill

Combining or not combining comes down to each use-case of how the drives will be used for data access, reliability, performance and the priority of such factors against one another for any given environment. So there is no "better" answer, only what's desirable to you the user.

However, as you've stated you have no particular reason, its time to PLAY! Combine the two drives using RAID 0 and run some performance tests. Keep in mind the set requires drives of equal size, so you can split the 480 in half and RAID just one of the partitions with the 240 drive. My Lacie Thunderbolt gives me 300MB/s with mechanical hard drives, so you should see 600+!