Late 2011 15" MBP Hard Drive Question

[jdwagner888]

Hello All,

I just ordered the OWC Data Doubler, a 256GB SSD and a 1TB Samsung Spinpoint hard drive to replace my stock 750GB setup.

Now that I will have an extra 750GB Internal Hard drive laying around, I would like to turn it into a good external hard drive (750gb is still alot of space!)

Since my mac has this new thunderbolt technology I hear about all the time, is there a kit that would effectively adapt this into a thunderbolt external hard drive for max transfer speeds? Or am I currently stuck with USB option.

Either way, are there any suggestions to a nice kit to turn this into a self-powered external?

Thanks

 

[SDAVE]

Best bet is FW800. Thunderbolt is too expensive at the moment and you're not really going to get amazing speeds out of that 750GB drive, anyway. The most it can do on SATAII is probably around 70-80MB/sec.

Get this little guy and you should be set. It's self powered via FW800. It also does USB 3.0 (And 2.0, as it's backwards compatible) so in the future you can pop in a faster hard drive/SSD and take advantage of USB3.0 speeds.

 

[jdwagner888]

Thanks, looks like USB/FW800 are going to be the choices for me!

 

[shortcut3d]

I actually get 90-120MB/s in a Seagate Thunderbolt GoFlex adapter for the 750GB WD Scorpio Black. Sure SSD performance is far superior, but Thunderbolt is an improvement over FW800 for a fast mechanical drive. I also believe the IO performance is much better as it equivalent to an internal SATA.

 

[SDAVE]

I actually get 90-120MB/s in a Seagate Thunderbolt GoFlex adapter for the 750GB WD Scorpio Black. Sure SSD performance is far superior, but Thunderbolt is an improvement over FW800 for a fast mechanical drive. I also believe the IO performance is much better as it equivalent to an internal SATA.

Is your Scorpio Black 7200RPM? The OPs is probably 5400RPM (I have that one too).

Also the Seagate combo costs a bit of money vs $69 for an enclosure with future accessibility to USB3.0 (Which is imminent in the new MacBook Pro for 2012 as Intel supports it natively).

 

[jdwagner888]

No mine is not 7200 rpm.

I looked up the adapter and reviews do not look so great for it.

Im sure it all depends on what drive you have attached to it. In my case a low end drive would be the bottleneck of this setup.