Firewire / Thunderbolt Storage

[mrgroovy]

My good ole Glyph is starting to act up and I think its time to replace. The glyph is the 1st in my chain of external hard drives the second of which is a OWC Mercury Elite Pro. The OWC is connected to my iMac via Firewire
I have one Thunderbolt (TBLT) port on my iMac but it is being used for an additional monitor. I am thinking of replacing my Glyph with an additional OWC (same as above) and keep my TBLT port dedicated to my external monitor.
Question: I have been thinking that maybe I want to move up to an Thunderbolt OWC instead of the Firewire for speed purposes. My understanding is that poses a problem because I have only one TBLT port, I would need to purchase a Thunderbolt hub if I want to keep the external monitor. Would that introduce issues such as heat and or data transfer issues? Would I be gaining anything?

[John_Toolbox]

What model/year imac do you have? If you only have 1 "thunderbolt" port, it may actually be a "mini display port", which used the same connector as thunderbolt. If your imac was built after 2011, it is probably thunderbolt, but there are some 2009-2011 models that have a single "minidisplayport" which is not the same as thunderbolt, it will support an external monitor but will not work other thunderbolt peripherals like audio interfaces/hard drives/docks. Best way to be sure is to check your model number on everymac.com

[mrgroovy]

Originally Posted by John_Toolbox

What model/year imac do you have? If you only have 1 "thunderbolt" port, it may actually be a "mini display port", which used the same connector as thunderbolt. If your imac was built after 2011, it is probably thunderbolt, but there are some 2009-2011 models that have a single "minidisplayport" which is not the same as thunderbolt, it will support an external monitor but will not work other thunderbolt peripherals like audio interfaces/hard drives/docks. Best way to be sure is to check your model number on everymac.com

Definitely a Thunderbolt and only one port in the back.

[John_Toolbox]

If you are using just one spinning drive, you probably won't notice a huge difference between thunderbolt and firewire. If you are using multiple spinning drives or even just one SSD, then thunderbolt will be much faster... It's most noticeable when you start moving large files between drives.

Thunderbolt has more than enough bandwidth to support your monitor plus other peripherals. To use your monitor, you just need to make sure you buy thunderbolt peripherals that have 2 ports, and put your monitor at the end of the thunderbolt chain.

Personally, I think the thunderbolt enclosures for a single drive are way overpriced, plus you need to buy the expensive cables. The multi-disk enclosures are fast, but also pretty expensive. I think a better investment would be a thunderbolt dock with 2 thunderbolt ports with a few usb3.0 ports. This way you only need to buy one more thunderbolt cable. USB3.0 enclosures are much more affordable, and about 5x as fast as FW800 so they still have enough potential bandwidth for an SSD.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by mrgroovy

My good ole Glyph is starting to act up and I think its time to replace. The glyph is the 1st in my chain of external hard drives the second of which is a OWC Mercury Elite Pro. The OWC is connected to my iMac via Firewire
I have one Thunderbolt (TBLT) port on my iMac but it is being used for an additional monitor. I am thinking of replacing my Glyph with an additional OWC (same as above) and keep my TBLT port dedicated to my external monitor.
Question: I have been thinking that maybe I want to move up to an Thunderbolt OWC instead of the Firewire for speed purposes. My understanding is that poses a problem because I have only one TBLT port, I would need to purchase a Thunderbolt hub if I want to keep the external monitor. Would that introduce issues such as heat and or data transfer issues? Would I be gaining anything?

There is no such thing as a Thunderbolt hub.

Why can you not provide the exact iMac model so we do not need to guess what exact IO or internal expansion options it has?

What is this drive for? And how large does it need to be? Why are you considering a HDD not an SSD? And how much performance do you want? Budget? When do you expect to replace this iMac? (That may affect best options)?

It is 2016 and hard to want to think about a HDD for anything except archival storage. And if an SSD FireWire is going to be a bottleneck/belongs in a museum anyhow.

My choices would be a SATA III SSD in a external Thubderbolt dock or tray, one with dual ports so you can pass through to your monitor. Possibly internally upgrading to one or two SDDs. Or if wanting higher performance a M.2 based PCIe SSD in an external Thunderbolt enclosure. A commercially packaged version of that is the Lacie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2. Actually I would only be looking at M.2/PCIe based SSD technology now in consumer SSDs, SATA also really belongs in a museum. Other lower end /lower-costo ptions you have are a Thunderbolt to USB 3 hub and using USB 3 SATA SSDs like the Samsung T3. with SATA SSDs the step down to USB3 from Thunderbolt is not a big penalty hit. I would be trying to buy SSD technology from mainstream vendors, the market now is different than the old old specialized FireWire/HDD market where Glyph and OWC etc. got established.

Unfortunately Macintosh IO is brain dead, the reliance on Thunderbolt is a joke, a single ~$300 consumer M.2 PCIe SSD like the Samsubg 950 Pro can saturate an entire slow Thunderbolt 2 link. Thubderbolt 3 will improve things for a short while, but Apple is slow to move with Thunderbolt 3. The whole reliance on Thunderbolt for storage expansion is just kinda silly vs. sticking a small low-cost high performance (~ 2GB/sec sustained read) M.2 drive in an internal slot. With modern iMac the likely best thing to do is max out the internal (Apple proprietary take on an M.2 drive) SSD when ordering the computer.

Sadly the Thunderbolt external SSD, especially M.2 internal based drive market is not as impressive as it could be at the moment, vendors are likely waiting on Apple to ship Thubderbolt 3 based computers. TheN hopefully we will see some innovation.

[mrgroovy]

[QUOTE=Darryl Ramm;2363700]There is no such thing as a Thunderbolt hub.

Why can you not provide the exact iMac model so we do not need to guess what exact IO or internal expansion options it has?
iMac (21.5-inch, Mid 2011)
Image of rear here
Do you want the serial number?

What is this drive for? And how large does it need to be? Why are you considering a HDD not an SSD? And how much performance do you want? Budget? When do you expect to replace this iMac? (That may affect best options)?
I do not want to replace my iMac this until I have some issues. It works great. As stated, my other external HD is the OWC HDD and it works smoothly as well, never had any issues whatsoever. In my experience with ProTools, and reading here multiple times, don't screw with it if everything is working. Therefore, thinking of replacing Glyph with an exact copy of my other OWC.

It is 2016 and hard to want to think about a HDD for anything except archival storage. And if an SSD FireWire is going to be a bottleneck/belongs in a museum anyhow.

My choices would be a SATA III SSD in a external Thubderbolt dock or tray, one with dual ports so you can pass through to your monitor. Possibly internally upgrading to one or two SDDs. Or if wanting higher performance a M.2 based PCIe SSD in an external Thunderbolt enclosure. A commercially packaged version of that is the Lacie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2. Actually I would only be looking at M.2/PCIe based SSD technology now in consumer SSDs, SATA also really belongs in a museum. Other lower end /lower-costo ptions you have are a Thunderbolt to USB 3 hub and using USB 3 SATA SSDs like the Samsung T3. with SATA SSDs the step down to USB3 from Thunderbolt is not a big penalty hit. I would be trying to buy SSD technology from mainstream vendors, the market now is different than the old old specialized FireWire/HDD market where Glyph and OWC etc. got established.

Unfortunately Macintosh IO is brain dead, the reliance on Thunderbolt is a joke, a single ~$300 consumer M.2 PCIe SSD like the Samsubg 950 Pro can saturate an entire slow Thunderbolt 2 link. Thubderbolt 3 will improve things for a short while, but Apple is slow to move with Thunderbolt 3. The whole reliance on Thunderbolt for storage expansion is just kinda silly vs. sticking a small low-cost high performance (~ 2GB/sec sustained read) M.2 drive in an internal slot. With modern iMac the likely best thing to do is max out the internal (Apple proprietary take on an M.2 drive) SSD when ordering the computer. Down the road

Sadly the Thunderbolt external SSD, especially M.2 internal based drive market is not as impressive as it could be at the moment, vendors are likely waiting on Apple to ship Thubderbolt 3 based computers. TheN hopefully we will see some innovation.
More Stats about my iMac:
Separately, the I/O connectors on the back of this particular model along with port specification’s data signal speed rating:

>> four USB 2 ports - (max signaling rate of 480 Mbit/s)
>> one Firewire 800 port - (max signaling rate of 800 Mbit/s)
>> one Thunderbolt port - (max signaling rate of 10 GB/s)

[Eric Seaberg]

My choices would be a SATA III SSD in a external Thunderbolt dock or tray, one with dual ports so you can pass through to your monitor. Possibly internally upgrading to one or two SDDs. Or if wanting higher performance a M.2 based PCIe SSD in an external Thunderbolt enclosure.

Just wondering why you think you need that kind of speed? How many tracks are you recording/playing at a time? You know that USB2 has a top-end of 480Mbps and that if you're recording 64-tracks at 48/24 you're only hitting 74Mbps?

Of course there's no reason to stick with USB2, but even FW800 has more than enough headroom unless you're doing film or tv mixes with hundreds of tracks. Just saying... you'd be better off to make your system disk an SSD and keep your audio on a 7200RPM platter for the price difference.

My $.02

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Eric Seaberg

Just wondering why you think you need that kind of speed? How many tracks are you recording/playing at a time? You know that USB2 has a top-end of 480Mbps and that if you're recording 64-tracks at 48/24 you're only hitting 74Mbps?

Of course there's no reason to stick with USB2, but even FW800 has more than enough headroom unless you're doing film or tv mixes with hundreds of tracks. Just saying... you'd be better off to make your system disk an SSD and keep your audio on a 7200RPM platter for the price difference.

My $.02

It's not just sequential rate that actually limit many DAW disks, it's worse case latency for that one seek too many, subtle fragmentation or concurrent workload (like Spotlight indexing the drive or whatever).

You can also sell your car and go back a horse an buggy. The irony is a ~$350 M.2 Samsung 950 Pro drive can do about 2GB/sec sequential read IO and ~300k read IOPS/sec. USB2 and FireWire are just museumware it makes little sense for anybody to spend money buying that stuff today.

And with the performance of these drives you can consolidate boot/system/audio and audio samples and still get higher-end audio/DAW performance than a dedicated Audio HDD. (And 2TB little M.2 drives are not that far away...)

With a modern SSD audio drive, DAW operation is likely to be less problematic than older slower HDD, allow operation at lower playback buffers (even with disk cache) and the SSDs are more reliable than HDD, backup/recovery etc. times much quicker and so on. Why would you *not* use these? Cost/GB is going away as an issue. The real reason not to use SSD is for offline archiving where HDD is a much better choice today. That may change in future as more focus is put on that use scenario by the vendors.

[mrgroovy]

Took me some time to reply as I had to do some "cypherin" about the newer storage technology. Now thinking that SSD is really the way to go thx to you folks: How does this look if I keep my iMac.
(2) Mercury Electra™ 6G SSD
Seated in
(1) OWC Drive Dock

I could then connect the dock to my iMac Thunderbolt and use the other Dock Thunderbolt port to run my other monitor.
Logical?

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by mrgroovy

Took me some time to reply as I had to do some "cypherin" about the newer storage technology. Now thinking that SSD is really the way to go thx to you folks: How does this look if I keep my iMac.
(2) Mercury Electra™ 6G SSD
Seated in
(1) OWC Drive Dock

I could then connect the dock to my iMac Thunderbolt and use the other Dock Thunderbolt port to run my other monitor.
Logical?

No don't use those docks for production disks, too easy to bump/damage things. They are designed for people who need to clone/copy bare SATA drives--and are super handy for that.

If you want a large external dock with SATA internal drive expansion my go-to high-end choice would be the Sonnet Echo 15+. Below that there are lots of other choices depending on what you want.

As for a SATA SSD I'd be using a Samsung 850 Evo or 850 Pro before the OWC drives. For reasons I've posted about many many times on DUC.

And as pointed out before with just a SATA III SSD you don't lose a lot going USB3 so you could look at smaller thunderbolt docks that provide USB 3, and use a Samsung T3 os similar SSD. Just make sure the vendors say whatever dock you are looking at works OK with a Thunderbolt (vs. Thunderbolt 2 computer, most should).