Silence is golden - Seagate desk TB adapter

[fatb0y]

Hi
As soon as the 2.5 Seagate TB adapter was available, several sites tested it. Turns out the adapter is only worthwhile if using SSD's (due to slow throughput of 2.5 drive). Now the 3.5 has come out I have not found 1 test -- there is a write up on Cnet that is somewhat garbled and has been cross referenced, but not 1 site testing it with some decent 3.5 inch drives. Is this a black out due to the excellent performance and other manufacturers exerting editorial (advertising) pressure, is it because Seagate pushed the product out early and has released no product to the usual testers (anandtech/tomshardware/engadget etc)? Anyone else seen a decent test of the new adapter?

 

[JayMBP]

IMHO, TB is an interface best suited for either RAID configuration or SSD.

As far as single HDD goes, even the fastest available doesn't seem to top 200MB/s... why not just get a USB3.0 HDD. When Mac finally support it later down the road, it would still be able to max out mechanical HDD at 1/10 of TB adapter's cost.

 

[thundersteele]

The 3.5'' desktop adapter is still listed as "available soon" on Seagates website.

What's wrong with the Cnet review? They have some solid numbers, and it shows that even with an ordinary HDD, the Thunderbolt is up to 1.5 times faster than the same external HDD on a USB 3.0 port, and comes close to the competition from Promise and LaCie.

Thunderbolt offers better and more stable performance than USB 3.0, even when the absolute possible writing speeds are not exhausted.
External SSDs are mostly useless since they are too small. But Daisy-chained HDDs in a Raid setup can be extremely fast, faster than single SSDs, and offer a lot of storage.

 

[g4cube]

In my testing with a 4TB GoFlex, I get around 155MB/sec using the Black Magic testing tool.

As others suggested, a single drive is limited by the drive max performance itself. Thunderbolt is not going to make it any faster.

Faster than USB 3.0? yes, but for reasons that have to do with how the driver performs, and how USB packetizes data transfers. In other words, Thunderbolt presents a drive as the SATA drive that is connected, and the AHCI driver comunicates with the drive as a SATA drive. For USB, there is a conversion from USB to block-IO commands, and from those block-IO commands to whatever drive is connects on the USB-SATA bridge.

I realize that that paragraph oversimplifies the I/O operation, but it is the basic gist.

The Seagate Thunderbolt GoFlex Desk bridge simple permits you to have a drive that can be daisy-chained, while the portable is not daisy-chainable. The advantage is convenience, not performance.

You can however connect multiple drives and stripe them together; but you can do the math to see how that becomes an expensive alternative to the Promise or LaCie or WD multi-drive solutions. 🙂

 

[Nebrie]

The status has now changed to "In Stock"

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/thunderbolt

 

[rw3]

Seagate GoFlex Desk - Thunderbolt Adapter - Samsung 830 SSD Installed

Here is what you will get with a single 6Gbps SATAIII SSD installed. In this case, I used the Samsung 830 SSD. Fry's has these in stock (at least in Dallas) and I picked up the Seagate GoFlex Desk - Thunderbolt Adapter yesterday as well as the Samsung 830 SSD fresh out of the box.

Performance Results

Results - Reads of 360.8 MB/s & Writes of 308.3 MB/s

Read of File via AJA from the 2big - Avatar Extended 720p - File Size : 4.29GB (Finder Info)

Result - 362.3 MB/s