Home · Register · Join Upload & Sell

Moderated by: Fred Miranda
Username  

  New fredmiranda.com Mobile Site
  New Feature: SMS Notification alert
  New Feature: Buy & Sell Watchlist
  

FM Forums | Post-processing & Printing | Join Upload & Sell

  

Archive 2016 · Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.0 for external JBOD?

  
 
Michael H
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: On
p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.0 for external JBOD?


Need to add some type of external storage for my 2015 imac. I have a base level late 2015 with plans to use external storage for most things.

I've been ready to pull the trigger on a OWC 4 Bay Thunderbolt 2 enclosure, but I've been thinking about it a bit more. at this point I am probably over thinking things, but would a good USB enclosure at half the cost be as effective? The point I'm wrapped around is the actual drive transfer speed. I think I hit throughput limits of drive speed on a 7200rpm drive transfer well under USB 3.0 limits. I'm not overly concerned with Daisy chain of thunderbolt. Only JBOD for now, no raid planned. Am I missing anything? USB 3 gives me some additional system options where today Thursday Dermot is primarily Apple.



Feb 16, 2016 at 03:24 PM
veroman
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: On
p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.0 for external JBOD?


Michael H wrote:
Need to add some type of external storage for my 2015 imac. I have a base level late 2015 with plans to use external storage for most things.

I've been ready to pull the trigger on a OWC 4 Bay Thunderbolt 2 enclosure, but I've been thinking about it a bit more. at this point I am probably over thinking things, but would a good USB enclosure at half the cost be as effective? The point I'm wrapped around is the actual drive transfer speed. I think I hit throughput limits of drive speed on a 7200rpm drive transfer
...Show more

Michael: Thunderbolt is measurably faster than 3.0. The caveat, of course, is that real-world usage and data types will have an effect on the actual speed you experience with Thunderbolt (or 3.0 for that matter). That being said, the difference between Thunderbolt and 3.0 is especially noticeable when accessing data from external drives, as you plan to do. And while it may be true that your drive transfer speed overall may inhibit things a bit, I would imagine you'd still be better off running Thunderbolt.

Indeed, when running Thunderbolt 2 using one of the better SSD drives, the difference in speed is pretty dramatic. MacWorld conducted a speed comparison between the two using an SSD and found:

"Thunderbolt was much faster on these SSD tests than it was with the spinning hard drive, and it was faster than USB 3.0 in all six tasks, though to varying degrees. It was 35 percent faster than USB 3.0 at writing our 10GB folder of files, 17 percent faster at reading those files, 14 percent faster at reading our large 10GB file, and a scant 6 percent faster at writing that file. Aja System Test showed more differences, though. The Thunderbolt-connected drive posted a write score of 355 MBps and a read score of 370 MBps, as compared to the 193.2 MBps write and 167.6 MBps read scores USB 3.0 posted using Aja System Test."

Hope this helps.

- Steve



Feb 16, 2016 at 03:33 PM
Ian.Dobinson
Offline
• • • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.0 for external JBOD?


The thing is how fast do you REALLY need ?

yes T/bolt is faster but as you say your sticking spinning drives in there and not intending to use raid , so your pretty much stuck at the speed of the drive .

then add in what you intend to use the drive(s) for . if its photo storage then speed while nice isnt the be all and end all . if on the other hand you want to transfer large amounts of data like HD (4K) videos then yes you will wnat the speed and will probably be prepaired to pay for it . but then you'll more likley be looking into raid and/or SSD drives .

personal opinion is id take the USB option and save the diference or at least put the difference into larger / more drives



Feb 16, 2016 at 04:37 PM
rw11
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.0 for external JBOD?


The thing is how long until you upgrade to a REALLY fast interface?

USB & T'bolt are converging right at this minute, and the result will be superior to both in many, many ways.



Feb 16, 2016 at 04:45 PM
Michael H
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: On
p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.0 for external JBOD?


Fair poin but I need something now, not in the future.

I'm leaning towards TB. There is a good chance I'll add one or two SSD.

rw11 wrote:
The thing is how long until you upgrade to a REALLY fast interface?

USB & T'bolt are converging right at this minute, and the result will be superior to both in many, many ways.




Feb 16, 2016 at 06:11 PM
Alan321
Offline
• • • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.0 for external JBOD?


TB is great. It is even greater as you start adding more drives or do copies between external drives because it has the extra data bandwidth to cope with that. USB will choke sooner in such setups. On newer computers there are even better links between the CPU and the TB interface, so that TB is more efficient than it used to be on older computers.

Most test reports do not too much multi-tasking going on while TB or USB are being used for data transfers. I can be copying one drive to another very quickly and still not bog the computer down while I carry on computing. Consider how much time you want to spend doing your copies and backups - if overnight is ok then USB 2 will suffice, but if you want it done as fast as possible to minimise data security risks then TB wins. Especially with SSDs and large-capacity modern HDDs.

The biggest downside with TB has been the cost, but at least the TB 1 and TB 2 devices will work on a TB 3 (USB 3.1c) system with an appropriate adapter cable.

- Alan



Feb 18, 2016 at 12:17 AM
butchM
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.0 for external JBOD?


Alan321 wrote:
USB will choke sooner in such setups.


Yes ... USB throughput is shared across all connected devices while Thunderbolt throughput runs in parallel ...



Feb 18, 2016 at 08:40 AM
OntheRez
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: On
p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.0 for external JBOD?


Michael,
I have the OWC "thunderbay." I performs significantly better than any prior system. I'm running three types of RAID in the box: RAID 0 with a pair of 480 SSDs that are my photo work disks and a pair of 7200 rpm 2TB Seagates partitioned with one half running mirrored for first photo backup, and the second spanned to provide a large time machine capsule. T-Bolt is significantly faster and in the first 6 months absolutely stable. I also have a 2nd external backup for pix in case the main drive goes down.

The combo of an internal .5 TB in my machine connected to the library via T-bolt, means near instantaneous access to files. Nice, though of course it doesn't do much to make Lr use video RAM better I highly recommend it.

Robert




Feb 20, 2016 at 10:17 AM
Chris Court
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: On
p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.0 for external JBOD?


Another voice in favour of the ThunderBay 4. I have 2 of them, and they're fast, quiet and stable. I would recommend getting the version bundled with SoftRAID, since the ThunderBay does not have hardware RAID built in, as OWCs older Mercury Elite Pro boxes do.

C

Edited on Feb 21, 2016 at 11:14 PM · View previous versions



Feb 21, 2016 at 01:14 AM
Michael H
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: On
p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.0 for external JBOD?


Thank you all for the comments. I'm ordering the Thunderbay unit.


Feb 21, 2016 at 09:34 PM
rscheffler
Online
• • • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.0 for external JBOD?


Just want to add another data point to this in case it may benefit someone in the future. I was looking to replace a Firmtek 5-bay eSATA-connected enclosure because I retired my Power Mac G5 and none of my other computers supported direct eSATA connections.

The primary criteria for the replacement was a tray-less enclosure design. I was fed up with trays. There weren't many choices out there already prebuilt. Particularly at the time for TB. I ended up with a USB3 5-bay tray-less enclosure attached to a TB dock that enables USB3 on my Macs, which are all pre-2012 when Apple started releasing products with USB3. Yes, this ended up costing about the same as getting a TB enclosure from OWC, but I also needed USB3 for other things, such as ingesting 100s of GB of cards in a sitting.

Anyway, the primary tradeoff of this decision was that USB does not allow hot swapping individual drives from a multi-drive array. If I'm running several drives, or a full array, and I want to swap out one or more of them, all must be ejected. Apparently this might not be the case for Windows. But it is for Mac OSX (I'm running 10.9 at the moment) and it's sometimes a hassle if I'm processing something to/from one of the drives, but want to check something on another one that's not connected. Ended up getting a single-drive USB3 dock for this purpose...

For spinning drives I'm fine with USB3. But I have noticed that transfer speeds between drives in the enclosure is slower than one drive in the dock and one in the enclosure. Internal enclosure transfers seem to be around 70MB/s whereas USB3 dock to enclosure transfers are in the 90-110MB/s range depending on the drives and other factors. So yeah, the shared bandwidth does have some consequences, even with spinning drives. But so far for my uses, it's fine.



Mar 02, 2016 at 12:18 AM





FM Forums | Post-processing & Printing | Join Upload & Sell

    
 

You are not logged in. Login or Register

Username       Or Reset password



This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.