3 ms·

Agree with this. While the steps Thunderbolt is going is great, it's still too much money for what it doesn't deliver. I'd love to have a TB attached SAN for m

Agree with this. While the steps Thunderbolt is going is great, it's still too much money for what it doesn't deliver. I'd love to have a TB attached SAN for my Macbook Pro, but what I need is usually sufficed by FireWire 800* or USB 2.0 external drive. * Even a FW800 external drive / enclosure is many times cost prohibitive.

mturmon 14y ago
Too much money is a function of how bad you want the performance. I have a Promise RAID attached to my MBP using TB, and it's really fast -- it makes firewire 800 look unacceptably poky. It's been a long time since I measured throughput, but it's like a factor of 10. If you work with large datasets, it's a clear win.
- r00fus 14y ago
  How does that compare, though to a raided SSD tied directly to the PCI board? I've been led to believe that 300k IOPS is possible using sub-$1000 gear from OCZ [1]. Combined with an agressive backup to spinning disk, this sounds like it'd scream like a monster and be stable to boot. [1] http://ocz.com/consumer/revodrive-3-x2-pcie-ssd http://ocz.com/consumer/revodrive-3-x2-pcie-ssd
  - mturmon 14y ago
    These two devices (external TB RAID vs. internal PCI SSD) operate in somewhat different parts of the (high end) of the bandwidth/capacity plane. Anand (http://www.anandtech.com/show/4489/promise-pegasus-r6-mac-thunderbolt-review/6 http://www.anandtech.com/show/4489/promise-pegasus-r6-mac-th...) found ~700MB/s sequential read/write performance of the TB RAID. He didn't test IOPS directly, although he did put SSDs into the TB RAID and test that (~1000 MB/s). You have to give him credit for that. In short, the sequential performance is pretty close to the real-world sequential performance of the OCZ unit. Which is quite impressive. The Promise RAID-6 I use has 8TB usable (and I got it 2 years ago). The units you mention have just 1TB usable (and no redundancy, which is a problem for big data sets). All this is somewhat academic for my use case, because I dropped my desktop two years ago when TB came out.
kylec 14y ago
If Thunderbolt is cost prohibitive, I suggest moving to USB3. It's cheaper and much more widely deployed, and it's much much faster than FW800 and USB2. In fact, for most external drives, it's just as fast as Thunderbolt as the limiting factor is often the speed of the drive(s) and/or controller and not the IO bus.

mturmon 14y ago

Too much money is a function of how bad you want the performance. I have a Promise RAID attached to my MBP using TB, and it's really fast -- it makes firewire 800 look unacceptably poky. It's been a long time since I measured throughput, but it's like a factor of 10. If you work with large datasets, it's a clear win.

r00fus 14y ago
How does that compare, though to a raided SSD tied directly to the PCI board? I've been led to believe that 300k IOPS is possible using sub-$1000 gear from OCZ [1]. Combined with an agressive backup to spinning disk, this sounds like it'd scream like a monster and be stable to boot. [1] http://ocz.com/consumer/revodrive-3-x2-pcie-ssd http://ocz.com/consumer/revodrive-3-x2-pcie-ssd
- mturmon 14y ago
  These two devices (external TB RAID vs. internal PCI SSD) operate in somewhat different parts of the (high end) of the bandwidth/capacity plane. Anand (http://www.anandtech.com/show/4489/promise-pegasus-r6-mac-thunderbolt-review/6 http://www.anandtech.com/show/4489/promise-pegasus-r6-mac-th...) found ~700MB/s sequential read/write performance of the TB RAID. He didn't test IOPS directly, although he did put SSDs into the TB RAID and test that (~1000 MB/s). You have to give him credit for that. In short, the sequential performance is pretty close to the real-world sequential performance of the OCZ unit. Which is quite impressive. The Promise RAID-6 I use has 8TB usable (and I got it 2 years ago). The units you mention have just 1TB usable (and no redundancy, which is a problem for big data sets). All this is somewhat academic for my use case, because I dropped my desktop two years ago when TB came out.

kylec 14y ago

If Thunderbolt is cost prohibitive, I suggest moving to USB3. It's cheaper and much more widely deployed, and it's much much faster than FW800 and USB2. In fact, for most external drives, it's just as fast as Thunderbolt as the limiting factor is often the speed of the drive(s) and/or controller and not the IO bus.