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Thunderbolt Drives

K

Kirihuna

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 1, 2013
68
1
Are Thunderbolt enclosures for hard drives worth it?

I'm looking at the LaCie 2big 8TB RAID enclosure and the rugged 500GB / 1TB external.

The raid enclosure would be set in RAID 1 for mirror. I would back up my MacBook and my Window PC to it, along with storing all my files.

When it comes to Thunderbolt, are you able to load games off of it? Say I wanted to use the 500GB and load 500GB of Steam games for my Windows partition, would they load fast enough? The drive itself would be limited to whatever speed the drive is, 5600 or 7200, but is the interface itself fast enough? I know loading over USB is slow.
 
Kirihuna said:
Are Thunderbolt enclosures for hard drives worth it?

I'm looking at the LaCie 2big 8TB RAID enclosure and the rugged 500GB / 1TB external.

The raid enclosure would be set in RAID 1 for mirror. I would back up my MacBook and my Window PC to it, along with storing all my files.

When it comes to Thunderbolt, are you able to load games off of it? Say I wanted to use the 500GB and load 500GB of Steam games for my Windows partition, would they load fast enough? The drive itself would be limited to whatever speed the drive is, 5600 or 7200, but is the interface itself fast enough? I know loading over USB is slow.
Click to expand...

USB 3.0 is fast, USB 2.0 is slow.

Thunderbolt is very fast. Faster than any sata III drive.
 
opinio said:
USB 3.0 is fast, USB 2.0 is slow.

Thunderbolt is very fast. Faster than any sata III drive.
Click to expand...
So Thunderbolt is as fast as the hard drive itself. Because a hard drive can't even saturate SATA III completely
 
Kirihuna said:
So Thunderbolt is as fast as the hard drive itself. Because a hard drive can't even saturate SATA III completely
Click to expand...

That's not the whole story though. Thunderbolt supports Native Command Queuing which USB3 does not. This is important for bulk files and sequential data (e.g. video/big graphics). Also, USB has a processor overhead.

Depends on your needs.
 
I'm currently looking to get the LaCie 3TB/4TB USB 3.0 + Thunderbolt external. Back up my entire Windows desktop as the hard drives are dying.

Also get the LaCie 10TB 5Big too. I can't transfer things over from the 5Big to the Windows because it's thunderbolt only. So it would be

Window PC > LaCie 3TB via USB 3.0 > LaCie 10TB via Thunderbolt > MacBook Pro via Thunderbolt.

I'll eventually change my motherboard to have a Thunderbolt port, but that won't be until later this year.

Would this work?
 
I have three of the LaCie Rugged ThunderBolt/USB3 drives and absolutely love them. One being the 256GB SSD model for software storage and deployment.

I also have three desktop drives: LaCie LBD Thunderbolt and 2x LaCie 2big 6TB ThunderBolt.

All of my drives work great and I've had zero issues with them, other than the LBD fan being horribly loud. The 6TB 2big read and write at 360MB/s when in RAID0 and they use the 1TB Platter Seagate Barracuda drives.

Let me know if you have any questions.
 
rw3 said:
I have three of the LaCie Rugged ThunderBolt/USB3 drives and absolutely love them. One being the 256GB SSD model for software storage and deployment.

I also have three desktop drives: LaCie LBD Thunderbolt and 2x LaCie 2big 6TB ThunderBolt.

All of my drives work great and I've had zero issues with them, other than the LBD fan being horribly loud. The 6TB 2big read and write at 360MB/s when in RAID0 and they use the 1TB Platter Seagate Barracuda drives.

Let me know if you have any questions.
Click to expand...
My main question is just this:

Also get the LaCie 10TB 5Big too. I can't transfer things over from the 5Big to the Windows because it's thunderbolt only. So it would be

Window PC > LaCie 3TB via USB 3.0 > LaCie 10TB (RAID 1) via Thunderbolt > MacBook Pro via Thunderbolt.

Would that work? Apparently you can't use the Thunderbolt and 3.0 at the same time. I need to get all my data easily transferable between PC and Mac without having to swap drives.

You answered my other question about if the rugged is fast enough to load games / applications.
 
As Mr Retrofire hints, USB 3 externals with UASP chips and new Macs are very competitive with Thunderbolt offerings right now.
 
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