jbregar Offline Upload & Sell: On
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Alan321 wrote:
The modern huge-capacity 4-6TB 3.5" HDDs can transfer ate up to about 180-200MB/s and are a lot faster than 2-3TB HDDs of not many years ago. Mind you, that is for sustained transfers and not for transferring typical small files. It seems to me that you often don't get told what drives are in a pre-packaged storage case, so be careful.
Doesn't matter. Even 200MB/s is a drop in the bucket compared to USB3. Thunderbolt will offer no benefit for you unless your drive system can saturate a USB3 bus... which NO single drive can do.
You'll want your drives to be a lot bigger than you need so that you can use just the first 30-50% for significantly faster transfer rates. The big outer tracks can feed you data twice as fast as the small inner tracks on any HDD - so long as the computer is capable of out-running the HDD.
I think "twice as fast" is a little bit of hyperbole. Most drives you don't see much difference at all from the tests I've seen. For photo-related stuff, I think you're being silly to recommend buying a 6TB HDD so you can use less than 2TB of it (30% of 6TB).
You'd see a much greater performance increase from RAIDing your drives on a good controller and using the majority of the drive.
Thunderbolt is better than USB 3 when it comes to adding another box for quickly cloning whatever is on your RAID case, without using up all of your data ports, because the interface is 2-4 times as fast and works both ways at that speed. This can be significant
Not unless your RAID AND the destination drive can fully saturate the USB3 bus... which MOST can't. In order to saturate a USB3 bus, your drives need to be able to sustain around 640MB/s. Assuming you're using a RAID0 (please don't) and each individual drive can do 150MB/s, that means you'd need FIVE drives before USB3 is the limiting factor. And you'd need that five drive RAID0 on both ends of the transaction.
If you're using SSD, then Thunderbolt may make more sense, but a majority of SSDs on the market right now can't saturate USB3 singly either.
Unless you're using a big disk array that can move a lot of data around, Thunderbolt and it's associated cost premium are a waste. Big, fast USB3 disks are relatively plentiful and pretty cheap, Thunderbolt... not so much.
This is like throwing a basketball down a hallway... does it matter if the hallway is 4' wide or 8' wide if the basketball is only 10" in diameter?
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