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ohsnaphappy Offline • • Upload & Sell: Off p.1 #1 · Thunderbolt Hard Drives Just ordered the new iMac with a Fusion Drive and all that. So now I have Thunderbolt and USB 3. I was really excited about purchasing an external hard drive with Thunderbolt, but I've found that even though these hard drives have Thunderbolt many are restricted by the 7200RPM hard drives inside. Any suggestions on a Thunderbolt hard drive that actually delivers fast speeds such as 180mb/s or higher? LaCie seems to have the only ones, and they run $500 or more. And keep in mind, the new Rugged Disc by LaCie has a 7200RPM drive in the 1TB model. Buffalo also has a 1TB model, but again, it has a 7200 drive. Both are delivering like 110mb/s from what I'm reading. And that's just not fast enough. Now there is a Rugged Disc with a 256GB SSD, and it does something like 380mb/s, but 256GB is too small for my purposes. What do you think is the best option out there? My 1TB FireWire 800 is doing 60mb/s and it looks like the best I can do is 110mb/s for around $200 Jan 10, 2013 at 08:07 PM

aubsxc Offline • • Upload & Sell: Off p.1 #2 · Thunderbolt Hard Drives Most consumer hard drives cannot deliver average sustained reads over 120 to 130 MB/s. The new Seagate 3TB 3 platter drive averages around 160 MB/s (peak of 200 MB/s at the outer sectors). A crucial M4 SSD averages around 380 MB/s over the entire drive. How much data do you have? Crucial M4 Seagate ST3000DM001 Jan 11, 2013 at 11:56 AM

Alan321 Offline • • • • • Upload & Sell: On p.1 #3 · Thunderbolt Hard Drives Get a big capacity drive and partition it so that you only use the faster outer half for your images. That'll increase the average transfer rates and decrease the average access times. Just look at the chart above posted by aubsxc. The slower half can still be used for other things such as a bootable clone of your system drive. However, to get really fast external storage will cost you. You would need to use SSDs or some sort of RAID-like arrangement of good HDDs. An expensive option is a thunderbolt to PCIe adapter box containing a 960GB OWC Accelsior SSD PCIe card. Super fast at 500-600 MB/s. I opted for a drobo 5d but I was delayed first by a lack of drobos and then by the need to upgrade my OS X Snow Leopard to OS X Mountain Lion to work with the drobo on thunderbolt, and all of the hassles associated with that change. I'm looking forward to reasonable speed and double drive redundancy. I've filled it with 3TB HDDs and an SSD and will partition it to suit various requirements with the photo data partition on the fastest part of the HDDs. The Lr catalog and caches will remain on an internal SSD but will be backed up to a separate partition on the drobo. [edit] That last paragraph shows a complete misunderstanding of what can be done with a drobo 5d. In fact, it gives me very little control of the number and size of partitions (volumes) and no control over which parts of the drives are used. That means I cannot force it use the fastest parts of the drives. It's no longer particularly relevant to this thread but I'll have to totally rethink my use of a drobo. Edited on Jan 22, 2013 at 04:22 PM · View previous versions Jan 14, 2013 at 06:57 AM

ohsnaphappy Offline • • Upload & Sell: Off p.1 #4 · Thunderbolt Hard Drives Here's my plan right now. I found the LaCie Little Big Disk 2TB refurbished for $237. The Black Magic Speed Test on this unit is around 200-210mb/s. That's pretty good! I plan to connect the Little Big Disc to two iMacs simultaneously via Thunderbolt. And yes the Little Big Disc has two Thunderbolt ports. In my studio there are two of us editing weddings on two different macs. Our wedding galleries are big, so we only keep one wedding gallery in LR4 at a time, and that wedding gallery goes right on the Mac's Fusion Drive. The rest of my wedding galleries, which are yet to be edited, stay on external hard drives until it's their turn. I shoot 40 weddings a year, 1000+ Raw images per wedding, D800. So the LaCie Little Big Disc solves a lot of problems. It allows me to access all of my wedding galleries extremely quickly, from two different Macs simultaneously. In the mean time, the wedding I am working on sits on my Fusion Drive, which is really really fast, like 420mb/s. If you guys have a better/faster suggestion I would really appreciate it. The only thing I know that's faster comes from Pagasus, but those are $1000+ Jan 15, 2013 at 12:01 AM

k7xd Offline • • • Upload & Sell: Off p.1 #5 · Thunderbolt Hard Drives ohsnaphappy wrote: What do you think is the best option out there? Cancel the iMac and get something that has at least 3 channels of internal SATA. Jan 15, 2013 at 12:21 AM

schlotz Offline • • • Upload & Sell: On p.1 #6 · Thunderbolt Hard Drives Sitting here with a Drobo 5D Thunderbolt 12 TB connected to my new iMac 27" w/3TB Fusion drive and 16gb ram - pretty satisfied Jan 15, 2013 at 02:56 AM

ohsnaphappy Offline • • Upload & Sell: Off p.1 #7 · Thunderbolt Hard Drives schlotz wrote: Sitting here with a Drobo 5D Thunderbolt 12 TB connected to my new iMac 27" w/3TB Fusion drive and 16gb ram - pretty satisfied For $160 you could go from 16GB of ram to 32, if you have need, and then sell the 16. The 5D setup is out of my price range I think, but it sure is awesome! Jan 15, 2013 at 03:00 AM

facedodge Offline • • Upload & Sell: Off p.1 #8 · Thunderbolt Hard Drives Heard great things about Western Digital.... Pulled the trigger on a 4TB Drive. Will test soon. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2412406,00.asp Jan 15, 2013 at 04:26 AM

alexkiowa Offline • Upload & Sell: Off p.1 #9 · Thunderbolt Hard Drives Lacie just released 5-big (5 JBOD drives) Thunderbolt version, NO RAID5, only os RAId0 and RAID 1 and JBOD. so.... pretty much DOA to me come on... we need RAID 5/6 for 5 drive version! Jan 15, 2013 at 08:38 AM

Alan321 Offline • • • • • Upload & Sell: On p.1 #10 · Thunderbolt Hard Drives ohsnaphappy, I hope you realise that those high speed transfers only apply to bulk sequential data and not to many individual photos or smaller files (like .xmp files) that may be spread all over a drive. It could bog down to just a handful of MB/s quite easily in real world work. Jan 15, 2013 at 09:33 AM

aubsxc Offline • • Upload & Sell: Off p.1 #11 · Thunderbolt Hard Drives facedodge wrote: Heard great things about Western Digital.... Pulled the trigger on a 4TB Drive. Will test soon. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2412406,00.asp Are they really charging more than $500 for a 4TB drive? You can buy two internal 3TB 3 platter Seagate drives and run them in Raid 0 inside your case (if you had the room) for about $270. That is a heck of a markup for a plastic box with a PCB with 2 SATA backplanes in it. Jan 15, 2013 at 11:53 AM

ohsnaphappy Offline • • Upload & Sell: Off p.1 #12 · Thunderbolt Hard Drives Alan321 wrote: ohsnaphappy, I hope you realise that those high speed transfers only apply to bulk sequential data and not to many individual photos or smaller files (like .xmp files) that may be spread all over a drive. It could bog down to just a handful of MB/s quite easily in real world work. So if I have a LR catalog on the Little Big Disk will I see faster read/write times than my old FireWire 800 drive? The answer is yes right? Just not necessarily the same 200mb/s that I'll get when transferring 30GB. Jan 15, 2013 at 05:05 PM

ohsnaphappy Offline • • Upload & Sell: Off p.1 #13 · Thunderbolt Hard Drives Ok I finally understand what you guys have been saying all along, only a SSD can give fast random read/write times. The Little Big Disk will only benefit me when I do sequential transfers of several GB's. I'm not sure if there is a better solution for my purposes, like I said, I keep one wedding gallery on my Fusion Drive in LR, each is around 30GB, and the wedding galleries I'm yet to edit I keep on an external hard drive. I do this for two reasons: 1) LR seems to run faster with less images. 2) The Fusion drive is only 128GB, a 30GB wedding is a big chunk of that. I guess I could keep all the weddings on the 5400RPM hard drive inside the iMac and let he Fusion drive decide what I'm accessing for me..... Jan 15, 2013 at 05:45 PM

k7xd Offline • • • Upload & Sell: Off p.1 #14 · Thunderbolt Hard Drives ohsnaphappy wrote: I'm not sure if there is a better solution for my purposes, I guess I could keep all the weddings on the 5400RPM hard drive inside the iMac. Your getting closer. You did read Adobe's generic disk recommendations? Jan 16, 2013 at 01:24 AM

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