Cheap Thunderbolt eSATA solution

You can go out and spend $179 on a LaCie eSATA Thunderbolt hub or make your own with various parts for under $55-$100. I was able to jury-rig a $3.50 micro male SATA to eSATA cable with the Seagate Thunderbolt docks to make a working Thunderbolt - eSATA solution.

I used both the STAE129 Desktop Adapter (reviewed here on this blog) and the portable STAE121 Go-Flex adapter (also reviewed here on this blog). Both can be bought, heavily discounted at the Direct Seagate Store. They often go on sale for $50 and $100.

All I needed was a special cable that is $3.50 on Amazon. It is basically a male micro SATA to eSATA cable. In short, a portable set-up can cost as low as $60.

In order to use this, you will need to break the two retaining clips on both sides. It goes in one way since it is a L-shape connector. Since you are using eSATA, you won't need the power from the SATA connector.

Voila. Thats it!

And guess what, OS X reports it as a port multiplier. I don't know if that is true or not but that is what is reported. This means you can hook this up to those cheap $80 4 bay JBOD RAID enclosures.

I connected to both the portable and desktop Seagate Thunderbolt adapters.
Performance wise, you will hit 3 Gbps SATA.

I connected them twice to the SansDigital TOWERRAID TR4UTBPN 4 bay RAID enclosure.

For a 9TB spinning RAID 5, this is not bad. See the benchmark below.

So there you have it. A cheap make-shift solution. I make no guarantees. You can fry something up. If you don't feel safe with this, you can always go and buy the La Cie for $179-199.


Link:
http://www.amazon.com/Micro-SATA-Cables-eSATA-Inches/dp/B002P6W8E8/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1384560580

Data hoarding and collecting hard drives.

Ever since the floods of Thailand, I've been hoarding drives as they go on sale. Just for me, I probably have over 60TB of drives in various sizes. These 4TB Backup Plus drives were dirt cheap the other day on Amazon for $140. 7200 rpm, SATA III 6Gbp/s and Thunderbolt upgrade-able.
These external drives usually cost much,much less than their internal counterparts. There are plenty of youtube videos on how to crack open these enclosures for you to use as internal drives.

I may just want to upgrade my Drobo 5D and replace all the 3TB drives.

STAE129 Seagate Thunderbolt Desktop Adapter Review

A few months ago, I reviewed the portable Seagate Go-Flex Thunderbolt adaper, the STAE121. Today, I am going to give a short review of the desktop version designed for the Backup Plus Desktop external drives from Seagate. The model is STAE129.

This dock/adapter is designed specifically for the Seagate external Backup Plus drives. I have about a dozen or so of these USB2/USB 3.0 drives in 3TB and 4TB configurations. They contained 7200 rpm Barracuda XT drives that are often way cheaper than buying internal versions. If you shop carefully, 3TB can be had for $100-120 whereas the 4TB can go for $150-180. I pretty much stock up when they go on sale.

The STAE129 is a pricey affair at $150 without thunderbolt cables (you can get cheap ones here).  Since I had a shelf full of these external Seagate drives, I figure, why not. I'll give this a spin. More importantly, my 2012 27" iMac does not have USB 3.0.  So this review will be based off a 27" Thunderbolt model iMac along with a brand new freshly HFS+ formatted 4TB Seagate drive. I will also compare USB 3.0 from my Macbook.

So here, I have a 4TB drive, STAE129 Thunderbolt adapter,  The USB 3.0 base that comes with the 4TB Seagate Backup plus, and the STAE121 2.5 portable Thunderbolt adapter for comparison.

You can use the dock with 3.5" bare drives if you are creative. However, I wouldn't recommend it.

Someone should make a 3.5" sliding cradle so you can use standard drives. 2.5" SSDs work fine (as I will show later). The power supply interchanges with the USB 3.0 base.

The main issue I have with the dock is the flimsy plastic pins that connect to the Backup Plus enclosures. They make a worrisome snapping sound when you dislodge the enclosures.
I was hoping to freely move my enclosures from USB 3 to Thunderbolt but I have to be extremely careful removing enclosures. There is a great likelihood you can easily snap them off.

After a few tries, it was best to gently dislodge from the front first.

Unlike the STAE121/128, the Desktop Thunderbolt adapter comes with two Thunderbolt ports for daisy chaining. Here I have 3 Thunderbolt daisy chained: Drobo 5D, STAE129, and the portable STAE121 at the end.

Installation:
In order to use this drive, you need to install some drivers for both Mac and Windows. There is a USB stick supplied in the packaging. I opted to download the latest ones from Seagate's website.

The driver is only needed on the Mac if you wish to use 2TB with Thunderbolt which was the case with me. If you have data on an existing drive, I suggest you back it up. The Thunderbolt enclosure prompted me to re-format the drive before using.


Performance:

So how does it perform? Well that depends on what you are using it with. If you are planning to use 2.5" SSDs, you are simply better off using the portable 2.5" Adapter. I tried a Samsung 830 SSD on both and the speeds were comparable.

Using Black Magic speed test, here is what I got with the Samsung 830 SSD.
 307 MB/sec Write, 360MB/sec Read on both the Desktop STAE129 and portable 2.5 STAE121.

So for SSDs, just save your save the cash and buy the STAE121/128 portable Thunderbolt Adapters.

Now, if you are like me and have a bunch of external Backup Plus drives, this is the adapter to get. And the point of this review is to see how it would perform in the most typical scenario - using the 7200 rpm HDD external enclosures.

With the 4TB Desktop enclosure, I was getting 177/176 MB/sec Write and Reads as shown below.

I would say this is pretty good. In fact, it performs better than the internal 7200 rpm 1TB internal drive, ST31000528AS, that came with my 27" iMac. The internal drive benches at 108/57 MB/sec Write and Read.

The internal drive is running at SATA II/3 Gb/s instead of SATA III / 6 Gb/s

I thought the benchmarking off the boot drive with a full OS may have caused some slowdowns. But that is not really the case as I cloned the internal drive onto the Thunderbolt drive and booted off the external Thunderbolt.

As you can see below, a full Mountain Lion clone install and boot did little to impact the performance of the 4TB Thunderbolt drive.In fact, booting and running off the drive via Thunderbolt was a pleasure. I clocked the boot time from fresh power to login screen at 29 seconds. That is not bad for a 7200 rpm HDD drive.

As you can see from the screenshots below, the first one shows the internal drive running at 3 Gigabit versus the Thunderbolt running at a full SATA III 6 Gigabit.

So it seems the Thunderbolt controller is running at full optimal speed. I was worried it might be a handicap device running at SATA I or II. This isn't the case with Seagate.

So how does it compare to USB 3.0? As I mentioned earlier, one of the incentive for me to get this was the fact my 27" iMac does not have USB 3.0. However, my newer Macbook does have USB 3.0.

Running Blackmagic off my Macbook, the USB 3.0 posts some good numbers. It is slightly slower than the Thunderbolt adapter. However, I probably attribute it to a slower USB 3.0 controller chipset. 

Hence, here lies the dilemma. Thunderbolt with standard platter hard drives are not a compelling sell over standard USB 3.0. The USB 3.0 connector comes free with practically every Backup Plus enclosures.There are advantages to Thunderbolt over USB 3.0. Most notably in smaller I/O operations. Booting off Thunderbolt and copying random files will be faster. In the case of boot time, it was 3X faster at 31 seconds versus 1 minute and 45 seconds for USB 3.0. Small I/O, random 4K seeks will suffer under USB 3.0. But for copying large files, E.G. movie rips and gigabyte files, it is a draw.

Now, if your computer doesn't have USB 3.0 as in the case of my 2012 27" iMac, it may be worthwhile to get this adapter. If you need proof, here is the exact same 4TB Backup Plus drive connected to the USB 2.0 ports of my iMac. 29 MB/sec Writes and 38 MB/sec Reads.

I think this last picture pretty much the reason for any pre-USB 3.0/Ivy Bridge Mac user who has Thunderbolt.

Go-flex lives on in the form of USM

It seemed as if the Seagate line of portable Go-Flex have been discontinued. You can often find 1TB Go-Flex drives in the bargain bins of Target for as low as $39.99. At first, I was very disappointed. I invested in a few Go-Flex docks and adapters; including the Thunderbolt Adapter.

To my surprise, my fears were misplaced. Go-Flex lives on but in a different name and different format. It is thinner, smaller and more compact. It is called USM (Universal Storage Module). In fact, there is a newer Thunderbolt Adapter (STAE128 instead of the STAE121). Seagate didn't do a good job of informing the consumer about this.

Well today, I picked up a USM drive and I didn't even know about it. The Go-Flex drives have been replaced by the new line of Backup Plus drives. They're thinner and more compact as seen below.

Compared to an original Go-Flex drive.

Here it is attached with older Go-Flex attachments like the Thunderbolt STAE121 adapter.

Old Go-Flex Firewire adapter works just as fine.

As I wrote earlier, Seagate didn't do a good job of informing consumers about USM.  After a few googling, a few other companies are implementing the USM format. Here are some examples of other USM products in the market place. There are Pogo plugged devices, desktop computers with slide-able docking bays, media players and NAS servers that now employ USM.

(image from Anandtech)

USM is basically a small format enclosure for 2.5" drives. They have interchangeable dock connections via standard SATA. The key thing is the standardized size.

When you look for an enclosure or portable drive, give USM a consideration. The ability to switch between USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, direct SATA and future connectors is pretty compelling.

Some reading links on USM:

http://www.sata-io.org/technology/usm.asp

FAQ: http://www.sata-io.org/documents/SATA-USM-FAQ_FINAL.pdf

http://www.seagate.com/solutions/usm/partners/

http://www.seagate.com/solutions/usm/products/

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.

Portable hard drive recommendation: Seagate Go-Flex

People often ask me for an opinion on what hard drive to get. They need something simple, portable and good enough to carry their music collection.

My blog pretty much covers fast drive setups such as SSDs and Thunderbolt but for most people, they want something with more storage at a reasonable price.

My recommendation would be the portable Seagate Go-Flex hard drives.

They come in 5400 rpm so they aren't blazing fast but they offer great flexibility and they often go on sale. 1TB normally goes for $70 and can be as low as $60 (discounted at Target). Why do I like them?
Well, I like the detachable end-piece that allows me to connect drives to a variety of different computers.

Picture below is an illustration of what I mean.
You can get end piece connectors that swap out for any computer configuration.

• Firewire 800 adapter
• USB 3 & 2
• Thunderbolt
• and even eSATA

I have an old Mac Mini and FW800 is the way to go. Some of my PC's have USB 3 so the USB 3 adapter comes in handy. The end pieces are easy to replace and there are even 3rd party docks and adapters that work with the Go Flex drives. You can even park them in and convert them into NAS drives as well. The great thing about Go-Flex is that you can use the adapters on other 2.5" laptop drives. Hence, you don't have to worry about future proofing your investment.

I have 8 of these drives and so far, they work great for storing music and files.

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.