Seagate Starts Selling GoFlex Portable Thunderbolt Adapter

[tbrinkma]

Yeah, because everyone wants to pay 10x more for the interface than the actual storage medium.

Thunerbolt is terrible as a widespread interconnect because of the controller chip cost, limited chaining capability, and system resource costs.

And USB (1.0, 1.1, 2.0, and 3.0) is terrible as a widespread interconnect because of the unreliable chaining capability (see the many devices that specify that they *must* be plugged directly into the port on the computer, because they don't function properly through a hub), half-duplex communication, comparatively low bandwidth, and CPU-time costs.

Seriously though, if Thunderbolt is 'terrible' as an interconnect, that means that PCI-E is 'terrible' as an interconnect.

 

[kas23]

The biggest difference is that USB 3.0 was available in general on Windows PCs while Thunderbolt was available only on Macs. Only about 20 million Macs were sold, which is about 2% of the global PC market.

2012 Macs will have both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt. So will many Ultrabooks.

Apple was instrumental in designing the Thunderbolt interface. Part of the deal was a year of exclusivity. It wouldn't have made sense for them from a business perspective not to take advantage of that. I agree they could have done more, such as release more Thunderbolt peripherals themselves.

Yes, I understand the exclusivity aspect. I do find it ironic that Apple wanted to be the only kid on the block that could offer TB, but this exclusivity has made TB near-useless for its entire duration. This basically reduced a great product to a feature people could take or leave.

Now, did this work out for Apple? Did all the smoke and mirrors surrounding the introduction of TB over the last year even lead to increased sales? I don't know for sure. But I doubt people picked up a Mac, as opposed to a PC, because it had a TB port in it. In fact, I would wager that 90% of current Mac owners don't even know what a TB and 99% likely never even used their TB port over the last year.

 

[Exhale]

comparatively low bandwidth, and CPU-time costs

Which are a non-issue for the vast majority of applications. Keyboards certainly don't need any meaningful amounts of bandwidth, nor do mice. Webcams and (consumer) audio systems work great as well, and the CPU consumption is of relatively little concern in most uses. (Stings a little on full blast, but then most devices don't do that)

Standard storage devices can use more bandwidth than USB2 allows, but they don't exactly care about the latency. Plus the speed of the storage medium itself is far below the bandwidth that TB permits. External regularly accessed (solo) storage devices are better off on eSATA (seeing as all TB hubs run SATA on the other end anyway, allowing you to reduce the amount of chips per connection by 3). Arrays of course, are best left to TB.

One of the fundamental problems with thunderbolt, besides the cost of the controller and wiring, is its PCI-E lane consumption. A standard Intel system only has 24 lanes available in total. Many machines have one or two used by a secondary SATA controller, another for ethernet, one for sound. Typically, its not uncommon to find yet one more consumed by a wi-fi+bluetooth chip. On top of that - your typical GPU reserves 16x for itself (though are frequently run on 8x)

With each thunderbolt controller requiring 4 lanes, you quickly run out. Firewire and USB by contrast, can run dozens of low-bandwidth devices on a single lane. PCI-E 3 does allow the lane requirement of the TB Controller to be reduced by half, but you are still limited to only a handful of connections in total - especially when devices that do not allow daisy-chaining are involved.

Thunderbolt works well as a backbone interconnect, but its ill suited to actually handle most individual devices - requiring Firewire, USB, or SCSI for that.

 

[Rocketman]

Now, did this work out for Apple? Did all the smoke and mirrors surrounding the introduction of TB over the last year even lead to increased sales?

Here's what happened:
1. Apple got 20x I/O which it desperately needed.
2. It partnered with Intel for a forward leaning standard at least one year ahead of its time.
3. Vendors did adopt TB as soon as chips were available which suits Intel, Apple's partner.
4. The most value added, expensive applications have seen early adoption. Apple branded display/hub. Sonnett external PCI box. Red PCI card. RAID. SAN. and a few smaller adopters now being added.

No one can hook their HD/4K cam to a TB hub. Yet.

Rocketman

 

[kamil97]

This seems pretty nice
" the $99 price doesn't include a Thunderbolt cable which still runs $50 at the Apple online store."

D'oh!!!

 

[mac jones]

This is from an Samsung 830 64GB drive using this adapter (Xbench)


Results 401.57
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.7.2 (11C74)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model MacBookAir4,2
Drive Type SAMSUNG SSD 830 Series
Disk Test 401.57
Sequential 289.66
Uncached Write 308.16,,,,, 189.21 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 275.81,,,,,, 156.05 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 188.51,,,,, 55.17 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 612.11,,,, 307.64 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 654.41
Uncached Write 680.75 ,,,,72.06 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 321.24,,,, 102.84 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 2179.59,,,, 15.45 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 933.10 ,,,,173.14 MB/sec [256K blocks]

The great thing about this is that you don't need the Go-flex drive at all really, although the Go-flex drives are rather nice (just hard to swap drives). Any SATA notebook drive will fit as it's just a standard SATA connector. Just lay the drive on the sled like case with something to lift it a little (I'm just using some scrap material), and you are good-to-go. Of course you have to keep it from moving around to much, but the adapter is substantial, and has a nice rubber non-slip bottom.

The Thunderbolt accessories are pulling a hefty premium now, but the two drives I own (actually one Lacie drive and an adapter) are quality items, worth the extra cost probably. It's not like they are gouging much (I would be the first to scream).

 

[sennekuyl]

Yeah, because everyone wants to pay 10x more for the interface than the actual storage medium.

Thunerbolt is terrible as a widespread interconnect because of the controller chip cost, limited chaining capability, and system resource costs.

limited chaining ability?

How many links in a USB chain have you ever used? I've done "Computer hub > hub > device ", but never "... > hub > hub > ..." and certainly never have seen "... > device > device >...

Very few devices are able to be daisy chained let alone to the 127 devices theoretically possible. Not to mention the decrease in throughput when you do create a star topology with USB.

I propose that daisy chaining with USB is rare enough to consider it niche practice and not an argument to dismiss Thunderbolt.

 

[Exhale]

land certainly never have seen "... > device > device >

Theres plenty of devices with included hubs.

Logitech has numerous keyboards, and Dell has their Ultrasharp monitors (cardreader). Easy examples, considering I use both.

The monitor currently has a SD card mounted, and a Cellphone connected via USB for charging and syncing.

The keyboard has a USB2 flash drive connected. The keyboard, aside generic keyboard functionality, also maintains a virtual keyboard and an active colour display along with the additional buttons used to control the computer software that manages that function. My mouse, too, maintains its own virtual keyboard aside from standard mouse capabilities.

I propose that daisy chaining with USB is rare enough to consider it niche practice and not an argument to dismiss Thunderbolt.

'Chaining' was, in hindsight, a bad choice of words. Rather consider it 'number of devices per controller without resorting to a secondary protocol'.

 

[RobertMartens]

Makes me want USB3 so badly... Low cost implementation, dirt-cheap cables, dirt-cheap drives, plenty of speed...

It's funny how you keep saying dirt, like it is a good thing

 

[MrXiro]

This is from an Samsung 830 64GB drive using this adapter (Xbench)


Results 401.57
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.7.2 (11C74)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model MacBookAir4,2
Drive Type SAMSUNG SSD 830 Series
Disk Test 401.57
Sequential 289.66
Uncached Write 308.16,,,,, 189.21 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 275.81,,,,,, 156.05 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 188.51,,,,, 55.17 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 612.11,,,, 307.64 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 654.41
Uncached Write 680.75 ,,,,72.06 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 321.24,,,, 102.84 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 2179.59,,,, 15.45 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 933.10 ,,,,173.14 MB/sec [256K blocks]

The great thing about this is that you don't need the Go-flex drive at all really, although the Go-flex drives are rather nice (just hard to swap drives). Any SATA notebook drive will fit as it's just a standard SATA connector. Just lay the drive on the sled like case with something to lift it a little (I'm just using some scrap material), and you are good-to-go. Of course you have to keep it from moving around to much, but the adapter is substantial, and has a nice rubber non-slip bottom.

The Thunderbolt accessories are pulling a hefty premium now, but the two drives I own (actually one Lacie drive and an adapter) are quality items, worth the extra cost probably. It's not like they are gouging much (I would be the first to scream).

Looking at your speeds... would this work as a boot drive to get full SSD speeds then?

 

[AidenShaw]

Even though the Thunderbolt specification says you could reach up to 10Gb/s, the SATA specification is capped at 6GB/s. I confuses me as to why Seagate is labeling their drive as capable of reaching 10Gb/s because that is technically impossible.

It's almost universal in advertising to go with the peak bitrates.

And it's not dishonest - the data travels over the wire at 10 Gbps. The long-term throughput isn't 10 Gbps, but that's the speed that each packet uses. And when a data request can use the disk's internal cache - the real transfer rate is close to bus speed regardless of the transfer rates to/from rotating media.

Also, remember to think about T-Bolt being a shared bus. It's not a "failure" that a single device can't saturate the bus - it's a feature that let's you add additional devices without any perceptible slowdown. In an ideal world, you'd want infinitely fast busses so that only the device speeds mattered.

 

[mac jones]

Looking at your speeds... would this work as a boot drive to get full SSD speeds then?

I don't know. I haven't gotten around to the fun stuff (strapped with other worthless things like, relationships, family....you know, tedious distractions )

Just waiting to get back to the fun stuff.......

 

[KPOM]

Awesome, I'm excited to hear your results!

I'm happy to oblige. Just PM me if I forget to post an update next week. I'm still waiting for the tracking number from Seagate, but hopefully I will have it early next week.

 

[sennekuyl]

Theres plenty of devices with included hubs.

Logitech has numerous keyboards, and Dell has their Ultrasharp monitors (cardreader). Easy examples, considering I use both.

The monitor currently has a SD card mounted, and a Cellphone connected via USB for charging and syncing.

The keyboard has a USB2 flash drive connected. The keyboard, aside generic keyboard functionality, also maintains a virtual keyboard and an active colour display along with the additional buttons used to control the computer software that manages that function. My mouse, too, maintains its own virtual keyboard aside from standard mouse capabilities.

'Chaining' was, in hindsight, a bad choice of words. Rather consider it 'number of devices per controller without resorting to a secondary protocol'.

The items you describe are hubs, no? Every monitor I've seen with usb has been a hub. That is that setup follows the "Computer > hub > device" which I described, or a star topology. It was pointed out I'd done that setup. As I understood it, it also should be possible to have devices that merely daisy chain the bus through to the nearest hub which is often the computer. For instance, "Computer > hub > device > device > device ..."

It maybe the keyboard is not a hub, in which case would you put an external magnetic HDD off it?

 

[ellsworth]

I don't understand, are we saying that this clips on to a normal Firewire 800 external hard drive and improves the speed it can read and write by 40%? How is that possible?

no, seagate offers drives that connect to different adapters.

if you connect it to the Thunderbolt adapter, it's 40% faster than if you connect it to the Firewire adapter.

I remember reading something a few months back stating that HDDs wouldn't benefit from Thunderbolt's speeds as much as SSDs would.

I'm also curious about this "40% faster" claim. From what I can remember 7200 RPM HDDs Max. Reading/Writing speeds were around 115-125MBps (depending on Manufacture.)

User "macduke's" portable 1TB GoFlex drive runs about 61MB/s write and 70MB/s read using FireWire 800.

"Using the new Thunderbolt adapter, we saw write speeds of 78.8MBps, or 40 percent faster than FireWire 800. Read speeds were about 79.3MBps, about 13 percent faster than FireWire 800.

The performance gains were only so big since they were testing against a single non-SSD drive."

I don't see the math? Am I missing something? Were the results from the quoted figures from a slower drive?

Curious.

 

[IeU]

This is from an Samsung 830 64GB drive using this adapter (Xbench)


Results 401.57
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.7.2 (11C74)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model MacBookAir4,2
Drive Type SAMSUNG SSD 830 Series
Disk Test 401.57
Sequential 289.66
Uncached Write 308.16,,,,, 189.21 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 275.81,,,,,, 156.05 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 188.51,,,,, 55.17 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 612.11,,,, 307.64 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 654.41
Uncached Write 680.75 ,,,,72.06 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 321.24,,,, 102.84 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 2179.59,,,, 15.45 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 933.10 ,,,,173.14 MB/sec [256K blocks]

The great thing about this is that you don't need the Go-flex drive at all really, although the Go-flex drives are rather nice (just hard to swap drives). Any SATA notebook drive will fit as it's just a standard SATA connector. Just lay the drive on the sled like case with something to lift it a little (I'm just using some scrap material), and you are good-to-go. Of course you have to keep it from moving around to much, but the adapter is substantial, and has a nice rubber non-slip bottom.

The Thunderbolt accessories are pulling a hefty premium now, but the two drives I own (actually one Lacie drive and an adapter) are quality items, worth the extra cost probably. It's not like they are gouging much (I would be the first to scream).

For a SATA-III SSD this arent great speeds, right?

 

[kgian]

I also would like to know if a thunderbolt connected hard disk can boot, especially windows bootcamp.

 

[cambrai]

This is the question i have put in the Seagate forums

I have an M4 512 SSD that i want to use as external storage, all tests aside does anyone have an idea when the adapter will be available in the UK? It shows on US Seagate site but not the UK one, never a good sign.

Thanks in advance for any replies

 

[Exhale]

It maybe the keyboard is not a hub, in which case would you put an external magnetic HDD off it?

I can run a HDD enclosure (hosting a WD Black) off it if I desire, yes. Obviously doesn't work as fast as if I just used the machine's eSATA - but it works.

 

[KPOM]

Awesome, I'm excited to hear your results!

I still haven't received a tracking number, and it looks like it is backordered now. Hopefully it comes soon. When it arrives, I'll post some tests.

 

[73CortinaV8]

So, thunderbolt has twice the bit-rate of USB 3.0 at (at least) 10 times the cost?



----------

Oh, and ask le olde-tyme SUN Microsystems SCSI users how much they liked the daisy chain topology

IT SUCKED.

 

[SoFresh~SoClean]

I just ordered one of these and the Apple Thunderbolt cable.

I've been using GoFlex drives for a couple years now. What's great about the adapters is that it's just a typical SATA+power connector which allows you to plug in ANY 2.5" SATA drive using any of the adapters (USB2, USB3, Firewire, etc). Because the Thunderbolt adapter is compatible with any GoFlex portable drive, you essentially have a Thunderbolt to 2.5" SATA cable.

For example, here's an image of a GoFlex USB3 adapter connected to a non-GoFlex drive.

I just wanted to point that out because it's not really known to people not using GoFlex products.

Great point but since this is just a picture of a hard drive on an adapter, it's unclear whether it actually works. Does it actually work? Looks to me like it's not even plugged in!

----------

So, thunderbolt has twice the bit-rate of USB 3.0 at (at least) 10 times the cost?

Reality-check: dollar value for performance per Gb can be pretty substantial, and part of that "twice the bit-rate" is another 8x FW800, remember.

 

[charlieroberts]

So... Who has the scoop on boot ability??? Someone has tried?

 

[IeU]

Yea i do also want know that. And also ask if the goflex tb has a sata2 or sata3 bus...

 

[Chundles]

Great point but since this is just a picture of a hard drive on an adapter, it's unclear whether it actually works. Does it actually work? Looks to me like it's not even plugged in!

It works well. We use them at work for data transfers - no need for taking apart fiddly little enclosures etc.