Thinkpad T420 triple drives with MSATA and Ultrabay

This is one of the reason why The T-Series Thinkpads rock! You have the ability to host Triple drives!

In addition to the standard internal, you can use an ultra-bay to host a second drive. Then you can add an mSATA SSD for a third drive.

I just upgraded my mSATA on my Thinkpad T420 from a Crucial M4 128GB to a Crucial M4 256GB. I have dual SSDs and a 750GB 7200 rpm data drive! One SSD for my OS and a second SSD for my Virtual Machines. With 16GB of RAM, this baby flies. Take that Mr. Ultrabook!

Finding the perfect SSD thunderbolt set-up? 2.5" Thunderbolt enclosure

Right now, you can't really buy a Thunderbolt enclosure for SSDs. I've seen people buy the Buffalo MiniStation and replace the drives. The most popular option is to use the Seagate STAE121/STAE128 Thunderbolt adapters.

Unfortunately, it is not very attractive with bare drives. I've seen reviewers use duck tape and it still looks ghastly. So, most people just run it bare as pictured below.

Well, there are a few USM enclosures now hitting the market.  With USM, you can use the STAE128/STAE121 Thunderbolt adapter and interchange with SATA/Firewire/USB 3.0.
This may be the ideal solution for the lack of Thunderbolt enclosures on the market.

This one from Calvary is a USB 3.0 enclosure (along with cable) and it cost around $20. At $20, I figure I give it a try and report back.

Cheap is the word I would summarize this product. It doesn't even have an installation manual or instructions. Rather, everything is printed on the box. I made the mistake of pulling the pieces apart; breaking some of the internal clips.

Installation is a straightforward affair.

Voila. A case to go along with the Seagate Thunderbolt Adapter. As you can see, it is a much cleaner set-up. There you go a 2.5" Thunderbolt enclosure that is removable.

Conclusion:

Well, this case works better with the newer STAE128 adapter instead of the STAE121. USM is much thinner than Go-Flex so you will still have some gaps if you are using the older STAE121 Thunderbolt adapter.

I'm not particularly impressed this specific enclosure. There is nothing to hold the drives tightly in place. If you have a thinner 7mm SSD drive, it will be loose. You will probably still need to tape it down in place. I would not recommend this enclosure with a platter spinning 2.5 drive. SSDs have no moving parts so I can be a little more forgiving.

The best bet is to look for a different brand of USM enclosure. I'll report back when I find another USM enclosure.

Bootable Thunderbolt on OSX 10.8

I had to use an external Thunderbolt bootable mac drive for the past 2 weeks and the experience has been great.
If you ever booted off Firewire or USB 2.0, the experience was horrible. You often felt like you were using a 2004 Macbook with a 5400  4800 rpm hard drive. Even USB 3.0 operates fairs very poorly due to random reads/writes. Thunderbolt doesn't seem to have those lag issues and feels nearly native to me.

My early 2012 27" iMac went kaput so it went into service. Before it went in, I cloned the drive to a SSD. While the iMac was in the shop, I booted off the SSD via the Seagate (STAE121) Go-Flex Thunderbolt adapter. I simply plugged the drive into another iMac (and Macbook) and it just worked like usual. No need to install different drivers for different hardware or re-configure anything.

Booting off Thunderbolt is a dream. In fact, running off an external SSD was faster than booting off the normal internal 7200rpm hard drive. Mountain Lion boots in about 10 seconds off Thunderbolt.

Carbon Cloning (ghosting) a Mountain Lion OS with the full Adobe CS 5.5, MS Office, GIT, MySQL suite took less than 10 minutes. My working OS build was approximately 40GB in size so this is pretty fast. I did not suffer any sleep issues or drive disconnecting. The typical usage was 9-10 hours a day.
The only thing that was a slight concern was the Thunderbolt cables warming after extended use.

This is an ideal setup for someone who wants to run different versions of OS and Apps. For example, you can keep up to date with FCP X and have a fast bootable OS with just Final Cut 7 when you need it.

Drobo 5D USB 3 and Thunderbolt Review

I've had some time to play with the Drobo 5D; filling up about 6TB worth of data (out of 10.89TB in my 5X3TB setup). I've been using it in a mix-use environment. I think I have enough time to form an opinion. So here is my non-professional, regular end-user hands on review of the new Drobo 5D Thunderbolt / USB 3.0 raid box.

Introduction

The device was originally announced during the summer and there was a series of delay, waiting and anticipation. Drobo did not release performance figures until they neared shipping. This was not a very promising introduction.

I was ready to give up and go elsewhere. The Pegasus R4 is the closest competitor to the Drobo and I'm sure it will be cross-shopped. The Pegasus R4 (4 bay RAID) system can be had for $1,000 with 4TB of disks ($985 at Provantage link, $1100 amazon link).

The Drobo 5D is $850 and it comes bare (enclosure-only) but does include a Thunderbolt cable (which is worth $50 by itself). You will need to load it up with drives.  If you are a savvy shopper, you can start off with three 2TB drives to give you 3.63TB of useable data (according to the online calculator) to match the Pegasus R4's storage capacity. So if you shop around, three 2TB will cost about an $300 (with heavy slickdeals-like discount and bargain hunting) which still makes it more expensive than an R4 setup.

Even though the Drobo 5D is more expensive (with drives), you do have 5 bays vs R4 only having 4 bays. You also have the added benefit of USB 3.0 which the R4 lacks. This broadens the use of this device over a Thunderbolt only system. With 5 bays, you have the potential of filling it up with 4TB drives; giving you around 14.5TB useable storage (from 16TB). That in itself is very compelling.

You can start off cheaper with a Drobo because you can add drives at any time. But, I doubt anyone buying a Drobo at $850 will skimp out by using 1 or 2 drives.

So why would I go out and buy this device? Well, I was already allotted a budget and "gifted" funds to buy one from a job I did over the summer. In short, I had to buy one or return the bonus funds I got from that job.

The Drobo Sales Pitch
Drobo claims this device will yield 400 MB/s reads with 256 MB/s writes on average. That doesn't sound as compelling as their competition who posts higher Megabytes per second. Rather, Drobo prefers to bench based on I/O per seconds (IOPS). They believe that "real-world" performance is where the 5D will shine.

They explain this in detail on their performance page: http://www.drobo.com/how-it-works/performance-professional.php

In short, they claim:

"While benchmarking give you a good indication of how well a storage device performs when it’s healthy and for a single task, it is still not a replacement for real-world performance. Benchmarks are nice, but real-world performance is everything."

Real-world performance includes a mix workload; copying various random small files in addition to large bulky files. This is where the IOPs figure comes into play. If you are copying a Photo Library folder with lots of small thumbnails or large volumes of small text files (say a web project), your transfers will be slower than if you normally copy something like large video files. I've seen this happen in the real world where I copied GIT repo of a website with thousands of files and it did indeed take longer than copying large movie files.

They claim 400 to 1280 IOPS.  For comparison, some single SSDs are rated at 40,000 to 80,000 IOPS. The Samsung 830 SSD has benched 4K random read IOPS of 80,000.

Other HDD manufacturers do not bench on IOPS and I could not find any reviews on the net to compare the Drobo 5D to when it comes to comparable storage/raid redundancy.

If you are used to thinking in Megabytes per second, you need to acclimate yourself to IOPS.

The Drobo uses a form of RAID which is similar to RAID5/RAID6/RAIDZ. They call it Beyond Raid and it has a some unique characteristics both real and perceived. It provides single or dual disk redundancy. This in itself is very important. This is a redundant RAID system.

Unlike traditional RAIDs, you can mix-and-match drives sizes (called Mix drive utilization). You can also grow your array at any time buy swapping out smaller drives for larger ones. You can start off with 1TB drive, add 2TB in a few months, or opt to mix and match with 3 and 4TB drives as prices drop. This provides un-paralleled flexibility.

Unlike other RAID systems, Drobo implements their version of data-tiering. Tiering, not to be confused with SSD caching, basically will automatically stores the files that require faster access on SSDs. The system automatically tunes itself and migrate data across SSD/HDD depending on usage. This is similar to the "Fusion" drive technology that Apple recently announced for their new iMacs/Mac Minis. Like the Apple's Fusion drive, the Drobo requires an SSD in the form of a mSATA drive that is installed in the bottom bay. This is the key to increasing IOPS performance.

Their pitch on data-aware tiering can be found here: http://www.drobo.com/how-it-works/data-aware-tiering.php

Using SSDs for acceleration, smaller and random reads benefit significantly while the larger HDDs are used for storing larger data.  This whole process is automated. Transactional tiered data goes to SSD and bulk data goes to platter drives. I can see the benefits for databases and virtual machines.

For a non-technical person or someone unfamiliar with RAID technologies, the Drobo 5D is a simple and easy to use system. In theory, you can't go wrong. You won't get the fastest drive setup but you will get ease-of-use and a rich feature-set. Automated data-tiering is a very compelling proposition.

The things I like

• Battery backed cache. This is found in more expensive RAIDs and helpful in case of power failure.
• The software has a nice GUI interface with tools like email notifications.
• Two Thunderbolt ports for daisy-chaining and it does indeed work well.
• Black thunderbolt cable that is slimmer than Apple's cable. Where can I buy another?
• Ability to mix drives and upgrade in the future.
• Thin Provisioning.
• Ability to boot from Drobo.

The Competition

Drobo's competitors here are other DAS (Direct Attach Storage) units rather than NAS like  the Synology.

As I wrote earlier, the Pegasus R4/R6 are the closest competitors to the Drobo 5D. The Pegasus  R4/R6 yields  635 MB/Sec read 535 MB/sec writes. R6 averages both 680 MB/sec read/writes.

You can get up to 1GB /sec when you load them with SSDs. Impressive indeed.

Reading Links:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4489/promise-pegasus-r6-mac-thunderbolt-review/6

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/my-book-thunderbolt-duo-pegasus-r4-2big,3222-8.html

The Pegasus units can be configured in different RAID types to suit your needs.

There are also other compelling Thunderbolt options in the market. Even the LaCie Big Disks goes up to 635/MB sec  (link: http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10549) And it start at $399.

The Western Digital My Book VelociRaptor Duo has 1549.77 IOps but that is a dual drive RAID 0 Thunderbolt enclosure (http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_my_book_velociraptor_duo_review).

In my opinion, the HDD based Thunderbolt system yields the biggest bang for your buck. You get better than eSATA/USB 3 and in some cases near or exceeding SSD territory for modest money.You can't buy 10TB worth of SSDs or a SAS based RAID cheaply. This is why the Drobo comes in. You definitely have the ability to have lots of storage.

Testing

Let me preface by saying I am NOT a professional journalist or reviewer. I am enthusiast end-user and a normal consumer like you.

My source drive is a Crucial M4 512GB SATA 6.0Gb/s running on a Macbook with Mountain Lion 10.8.2. The Crucial M4 random reads bench at 45-50,000 IOPS (http://techreport.com/review/20646/crucial-m4-solid-state-drive).

In short, my source copies will not be bottlenecked copying to the Drobo.

My Drobo 5D setup:

• Five Seagate ST3000DM001 3TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 
• Crucial M4  mSATA 6gb/s 128GB SSD w/ latest firmware 01MG as the cache accelerator drive

My set-up gives me 10.89TB useable space (15TB of drive, actual size 13.64TB).


Knowing that the Drobo 5D will not bench that great using MB/sec, I attempted to evaluate this device on Drobo's premise of mix-real world usage. However, I will also present synthetic Black Magic numbers for reference.

In terms of USB 3.0 performance, this is what Black Magic shows. 90MB/s write 110-130MB/s reads.

I've gotten better performance with eSATA boxes like the OWC Elite Pro Qx2 connected via USB3-to-eSATA adapters. It would be unfair to compare this number to faster performing single drives because this is a redundant RAID set-up. However, the OWC Elite Pro Qx2 would also be in a RAID5 format so these numbers are not that great in terms of Black Magic benchmarking.

Next, Thunderbolt. the best I could muster over several tries were 210-240 MB/s writes and 290-300MB/s reads. This is actually good for a consumer RAID but fall short when compared to something like the Pegasus R4.

Again, these are just synthetic numbers that an application produces and is not indicative of real-world use. Im not a professional reviewer so I can't give you IOPs numbers.

To follow Drobo's assumption of real-world mix usage, I attempted to see how well it performed copying a mix of different file types.

Instead of trying another synthetic test, I did it the old fashion way. I timed it. My test is all writes. I am more concerned about fast the drive writes my copy rather than how fast it reads.

Instead of copying large 30GB files to see the sustained transfer rate, I opted to try a typical usage of copying my photo backups. This s a 28.76GB folder of 2,277 photos in RAW format from my DSLR. This is 2-3 months of photos and typical usage example to test performance of copying a lot of medium sized files where the should Drobo shines.

I called this the Photo test.

I did another test with extremely small files. A webserver folder with 27,759 items clocking it at 1.5GB. These include small 5k HTML/Javascript files. So this would be a typical thing for a web developer to back up his/her files of a working project.

This is the WebTest.

I compared it with a bunch of different drives to get an idea how the Drobo fared. Obviously, it won't be as fast as SSDs but I tested with some SSDs just for reference.

• Samsung 830 SSD via USB 3.0 in an Oyen Mini-Pro enclosure (with ASMedia 1051e chipset).
• Samsung 830 SSD w/ Seagate Thunderbolt Adapter
• Internal Seagate Momentum XT 2.5 " 7200 rpm drive. This is the Hybrid XT drive.
• 5400 rpm USB 3.0 Seagate Go Flex portable drive
• 5400 rpm Firewire 800 Seagate Go Flex portable drive
• USB 3.0 Hitachi portable 2TB drive. 5900 rpm.
• HDD Thunderbolt comparison against a LaCie 2Big 4TB in RAID 0.

Here are the results... I will give a summary and interpretation below.
Photo Test. Copying 28GB of Photos.

Shorter bars are always better.

Web Test. Copying a folder of HTML/Javascript/PHP files.

Full Chart.

	Device	Time (min.sec)
Photo Test	USB3.0-Samsung SSD	1.54
Photo Test	Thunderbolt-Samsung SSD	1.30
Photo Test	HDD Seagate 7200 rpm internal drive	6.18
Photo Test	5400 rpm 2.5 Go Flex USB 3	6.18
Photo Test	5400 rpm 2.5 Go Flex via Firewire 800	6.18
Photo Test	5900 rpm external Hitachi USB 3	10.02
Photo Test	LaCie 2 Big Thunderbolt 4TB	1.47
Photo Test	Drobo 5D	3.58
Web Copy	USB3.0-Samsung SSD	2.28
Web Copy	Thunderbolt-Samsung SSD	.27
Web Copy	HDD Seagate 7200 rpm internal drive	.41
Web Copy	5400 rpm 2.5 Go Flex USB 3	12.04
Web Copy	5400 rpm 2.5 Go Flex via Firewire 800	1.36
Web Copy	5900 rpm external Hitachi USB 3	14.41
Web Copy	LaCie 2 Big Thunderbolt 4TB	.28
Web Copy	Drobo 5D	1.04

Test observations.

Going in,  I knew the SSDs will smoke any HDD system. That is a given.
The Drobo 5D performs decent in my view. It is not super fast and not slow. The LaCie 2big Thunderbolt simply smokes it but we have to remember, the LaCie is a Striped RAID vs Redundant Array. Also, the LaCie is  4TB/6TB  vs 10TB (you can go up to 16TB on the Drobo).

If you notice, Firewire smokes the USB implementation when it came to small 4k-10K file web copies. This illustrates the inefficiencies of the BOT (Bulk-Only-Transport) protocol of USB 3.0.

Watching the progress bar on a regular USB 3.0 drive was painful to watch as it struggles with smaller files. 12-15 minutes for a 1.5GB folder!

The Drobo 5D performed surprisingly well. Like I said earlier, the synthetic benchmarks will not give you a realistic idea of how the drives will perform in the real world.

So is the Drobo 5D fast?

I wish I had a Pegasus R4 to compare. I ran this test about 3 times on fresh formatted systems. I also skipped testing the Drobo 5D via USB 3. It simply wasn't that fast with USB 3.0 in my view.

It did surprisingly well where it was suppose to -  with smaller files. If you are copying 4-6GB Blu-Ray ripped movies, there will be other things out there that will out-run it.

How it fares will ultimately depend on how you plan to use the device.  I would also add that my test may not be indicative of your use. The device is suppose to automatically tier the data upon repeated use and you might fare better in a different workload environment.

The speed perception will also depend on what you are used to. I've been living with SSDs in my day-to-day life that I'm very spoiled. I carry about 4-5 SSDs in my carry bag. The LaCie 2big is also a very fast HDD Thunderbolt enclosure. Read and writes average 300+ MB/sec. But I have to remind myself that the LaCie is a striped RAID and not a redundant RAID like the Drobo 5D. The redundant RAIDs I've used are the OWC Mercury, MediaSonic, and Sans-Digital eSATA based systems for consumers. At RAID5, they often top out at 150-200 MB/sec. So when you compare it to the Drobo 5D, the Drobo is indeed faster. However, those enclosures are  $300-400 versus a $850 Drobo.

Is this for you?

First and foremost, you need to have a Thunderbolt equipped machine to be in the market for this device. The USB 3.0 is a nice add on for future proofing but it isn't the main reason to buy this device.

Should you use this device in a network share environment? No. This is not a NAS or even recommended as storage for your SOHO server. I've read of people planning to use this device ( and other Thunderbolt RAID systems) as storage for mac mini server set-ups. With Gigabit's theoretical 125 MB/sec limits, this device is over-kill on single NIC servers. You'll need Fast multiple NIC teaming or 10GbE networks to properly use this for multiple clients.  Otherwise, there are mini-SAS eSATA solutions. Look elsewhere for a dedicated NAS system for your SOHO use.

There will be users who buy the Drobo 5D as their primary backup system. Like with all backups, it is not a good idea to have all your eggs in one basket because with one catastrophic failure, you lose everything. There are countless horror stories on RAID failures. Drobo is not unique . If you plan to use this as your primary backup, please consider having additional offline or additional supplemental backups as well.

I think the buyers will most likely be creative professionals who need fast, large storage. They include photographers and video editors who need to move large files fastly. If you are planning to copy and archive  your MP3 music collection, this is definitely over-kill.

My use case would be a mix usage with a heavy leaning on using it as a fast work drive. E.G. scratch drive, running Virtual Machines, Lightroom catalogs.

Drobo with other platforms.

Right now, Macintoshes have a monopoly in terms of Thunderbolt usage. I'll follow up in the future to give my opinion on using this with Linux (via USB 3.0).

Conclusion

You need to heavily weigh your needs and your usage to consider this device.

Filling up a Drobo is not cheap. 5x 2TB drives would cost you around $500 (if you can get the drives at $100 a piece) and this would yield you 7.26TB of usable space according to their drive calculator.
Dont even bother with 1TB drives. The difference being $70 vs $100 2TB on sale, go for the 2TB or 3TB HDD drives. Hence, we are now talking about around $1350 to begin. This does not include the mSATA cache accelerator drive.  With a 128GB mSATA cache drive, you are looking at $1500.
$1500 can buy you lots of drives, SSDs, and even a few RAID enclosures.

As for a redundant backup system, you may want to skip the Drobo 5D because I do believe the $850 is a bit pricey for that type of use. If you absolutely need to have something faster than your current backup system, then the Drobo 5D may be an option for you.

As for a performance oriented work drive, it is a tough call. The Pegasus R4 is a proven performer with little problems (according to end users and message boards). You can buy an R4 for your fast RAID5 and a few external USB 3.0 3TB drives for your secondary backups. Or you can buy a LaCie Big Disk (I got a 4TB refurb for $200) and a lot of spare 3-4TB external drives.

The picture below exemplifies this hard choice. $900 can get you a LaCie 2big, 2 SSDs, three 3TB USB 3.0 external drives (totaling 9TB) vs an empty bare Drobo 5D enclosure (with no drives). 13TB vs 0 on the Drobo.

For me, it boils down to this, how big of a scratch work drive do I need? If you need 6 TB and larger, the Drobo is a good buy.

There is no substitute for the fact you can get up to 16TB of storage with good speed. 200-350 MB/s is still very good.

If you are looking for a combination of both in terms of mix-use (backup drive and work drive), then you might buy the sales pitch Drobo is making.

As for me, I think a mix-setup that I currently have is more preferable: A fast 4TB cheap Thunderbolt striped RAID or SSDs for work disk and a NAS for backup along with multiple external drives/cheaper RAID setups.

If the Drobo 5D was $100-$200 cheaper, I would totally recommend it.

I'll probably end up keeping this device. I can always use the storage.

Update 2012-12-03: Thunderbolt does not work under Windows. Read more on my blog post.

Fast small 2.5" USB3 - SSD enclosure : Oyen Mini Pro

Not all USB enclosures are built the same.
Chipset controllers make a big difference. In the firewire days, you'd search out Oxford 911 chipsets enclosures because you knew they were the fastest. The same applies for USB enclosures.

Today, I got myself an OYEN DIGITAL Mini Pro USB 3.0 2.5" case. It currently retails for $30.

It has the following:
ASMedia 1051E chipset.
This chipset supports a full SATA III 6GBps drives at full speed. Most of the USB 2 and 3 enclosures support only SATA I & II. Depending on firmware, some 1051E controllers support UAS (USB Attach SCSI) protocol. I don't if that is the case here so I can comment.

So if you plan to find an enclosure/dock, look for one with a ASMedia controllers. The 1051E is currently the best USB 3.0 controller on the market. I've used Gensys Logic GL3310 controller cases and they tend to run 20% slower.

Overall, here are my impressions:
It is a great enclosure reminiscent of older G-Technology aluminum G-Drive.
This one has a black matte aluminum PVD like finish. It is very high quality.

It is surprisingly good and pushes the limites of current USB 3.0 to SSD enclosures.
Using a Samsung 830, I've exceeded the BOT (Bulk Only Transport) bottlenecks going over 260 MB/sec.

I do not know if this firmware has UAS but it is definitely fast.

Most importantly, this case is cheap compared to its nearest competitor at $75, Mercury Elite Pro mini which also has the same ASMedia 1051E controller. (http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other+World+Computing/MEPMU3ESK/)
The Mercury Elite does have an additional eSATA connection but I don't know if that justifies the $45 premium.

Furthermore, in my experience, eSATA has been capped at 200 MB/seconds. You will need a special eSATA 6Gbps card that supposedly takes more bandwidth but I have not yet seen it to be proven in any tests. Most likely, your standard eSATA port on your existing computer is limited to 1.5-3Gbps.


In short, if you are looking for something around $20-30, definitely look at the Oyen.

Here are some quick speed test using a SSD to test its full potential.

Here is a quick youtube benchmark video. You can see it peaking over 230 MB/sec write and 270 MB/sec reads.

BlacX 5G USB 3.0 Update. Fastest USB 3.0 on a Mac

A few months back, I blogged about the BlacX 5G USB 3.0 dock and it being one of the few USB 3.0-SATA dock device to support UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol). UASP is a supercharged version of USB 3.0 with an extra boost of turbo. Anandtech noted that the new 2012 Ivy Bridge Macbooks now supports UASP.

With 10.8.2 update, I decided to follow up by seeing if anything has changed using Samsung 830 SSDs.

Today, I tried USB 3.0 booting from an Samsung 830 SSD and I was floored. 12 second cold boot into Mountain Lion. But most importantly, I was getting Thunderbolt speed in the "real world."

Then I ran some benchmarks.
305 MB/s Write on average and 400 MB/s Read.

Thats right. 300/400 MB/s. I still could not believe it so I booted into a few different installs of Mountain Lion 10.8.2. I even tried another Samsung 830. I ran this test 4-5 times with different configuration to see if there wasn't a fluke.


I discounted BlackMagic's speed test and monitored the Disk I/O the Activity Monitor. As you can see, copying and reading 50GB of tests, you can see it reading 400 MB/second. OK, BlackMagic wasn't acting weird.

I then tried my real world test of copying a 30GB Virtual Image .VMDK file.
A 30 GB ( 29.31 GB VMDK to be exact) took 1.33 seconds to copy.

To do the math. It definitely corroborates the benchmark. According to my calculator, it wrote at 300.56048 MB/second in real time. This is not a synthetic benchmark but what you will actually get in the real world.

After reading all of this and you still don't believe me?
I did a video on my iPhone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaHPh5cKmTI

There you have it. This may be the fastest USB 3.0 to SSD adapter setup on a Mac and even PC (unless you have a new rare Gigabyte motherboard with UASP USB 3.0 controllers). These test were done using the Samsung 830 SSDs.

The Blac X 5G is smoking fast with UASP. It appears to have an ASMedia 1051 controller.

La Cie 2big thunderbolt enclosure w/ 2 SSDs

Just in. I got a La Cie thunderbolt 2 big drive and loaded them up with some Samsung SSDs.
400 MB/s write and 475 MB/s reads.

Seagate GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapter (STAE121) review w/ Samsung 830 SSD

This is another web review of the GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter. Here is a short summary: It is SMOKING FAST.

After accumulating over 7 or so 2.5" Seagate GoFlex drives, I decided to take one of these for a spin.
I love the idea of the GoFlex and I've been happy with mix and matching drives (USB2, USB3, and Firewire 800 connectors).

With 8 SATA6 SSDs lying around, Thunderbolt was the next logical step to take advantage of them. If you've been reading my blog, I've tried everything with my SSDs - enclosing them in eSATA RAID enclosures, chaining up in striped RAID over USB 3.0, and other means of squeezing out the most performance externally. Now, I've given up and have gone Thunderbolt and for good reasons. With an SSD, it is fast (scroll to the bottom).


Go-Flex adapters have SATA on one end and a connector (usually USB) on the other. This one is slightly larger with a bottom base (to house the Thunderbolt electronics). The great thing is that they will also work with any 2.5" standard SATA drives found in laptops and this includes SSDs.

Here it is pictured next to a USB 3.0 Go-Flex adapter.

Furthermore, I should note, the expensive Thunderbolt cable is not included and you will need to source one before using this adapter.

As for speed, you won't be terribly impressed with the adapter using  a standard HDD drive. The normal  Go-Flex 1 TB drives run at 5400 rpm so they will perform as fast as a drive connected internally.

First of all, with the standard a standard 1TB Go-Flex drives, I was getting some 80MB/s read and write using BlackMagic's speed tesk. These aren't that better over a standard connection like USB 3.0.

USB 3.0 yielded slightly slower benchmarks that you won't notice too much in real world situations.

You will need SSDs to see how wonderful Thunderbolt really is. I paired up some Samsung 830 128GB SSDs to both Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 to see how they performed.

 

Here are some preliminary results:

Using Thunderbolt, you will see in excess of 300 MB/s reads and writes. 360 MB/s read was normal after several runs.

Now here is USB 3.0 speed for reference and comparison. 180-200 MB/s write and reads. Clearly, Thunderbolt is superior.

Synthetic benchmarks is one thing. What matter how will it perform in the real world. My typical use case would be  copying large files like virtual machines, system clones, and large media files.

For my test, I copied a 30GB Vmware VMDK file from my boot drive which is a M4 512GB SSD capable of 500 MB/s reads.


From my internal 512GB Crucial M4 SSDs to SSD via USB.
2:24.7

From my internal 512GB Crucial M4 SSDs to a Samsung 830 SSD using Thunderbolt.
1:31:3

63% faster with Thunderbolt.

Now lets compare with a standard 7200 rpm drive connected directly to my notebook on the fastest SATA6 bus.

From my internal 512GB Crucial M4 SSDs to a Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid 7200 rpm drive.
7:46.8

If you are not using SSDs, expect your time to be 10-12 minutes with standard hard drives.

In another test, I copied a 6GB Windows 7 VM image on to the SSD. Total time to copy was 12 seconds. Booting from the same Virtualized image of Windows 7  off a Thunderbolt SSD took 11.3 seconds to boot to the log in screen. This is faster than most of the computers on my company's network. Let repeat that again. It took 11.3 seconds to boot a virtualized Windows.

There you have it. Thunderbolt is smoking fast. Thunderbolt vs USB 3.0. There is no contest.
It totally obliterates USB 3.0. More importantly, Thunderbolt now makes external bootable drives a reality. You can safely boot off an external drive with little or no performance penalty. In some cases, the external Thunderbolt boot drive will be faster than the internal drive as it is in the case of my 27' iMac which still uses a regular hard drive.


I will update this blog later as I get two more high performance Thunderbolt drives : LaCie Big 2 and Drobo 5D in the coming days.

Samsung 830 SSD USB 3.0 RAID-0 in OSX and Ubuntu 12.04

Striping two USB sticks was cool but I wanted to try it further with two fast SSDs.
As many people know, the Samsung 830s are fast, reliable and great SSDs. They make great candidates for a SSD based RAID.

In my search for a super fast consumer grade RAID solution, I figure I try USB 3.0 and see what happens next.

I did tests on both Mac OSX Mountain Lion and Ubuntu 12.04 (off a Gigabyte GA-H67N-USB3-B3 motherboard).

On the Mac. Making a stripe software raid-0 is pretty straightforward using Disk Utility.

In Ubuntu 12.04. Setup is almost as easy as the mac.

The results were not that great as the Thunderbolt solutions I've seen. In fact, I now think it is is more economical to get platter based spindle thunderbolt RAID drives instead of trying USB/eSATA with SSDs.

I'm getting 200 MB/s writes on both OSX/Linux and 200-300MB/s reads. Have in mind, these are blazing speeds if you only used to using regular HDDs. However, the results are unimpressive in a RAID-0 array.

Real world copy. 200 MB/s

In fact, I see no real speed gains striping two SSDs with USB 3.0. Single SSDs are just as fast.
Or simply, the USB 3.0 controllers are not up to speed with the fastest SSDs yet. This may explain why I haven't seen any interesting or worthwhile USB 3.0 RAID enclosures on the market.

I think I'm going to have to spend the cash on a Thunderbolt solution because eSATA and USB 3.0 is not cutting it for a DAS (Direct Attach Storage) solution.