External storage systems Questions????

[TruestPain]

Looking for the best performance external hard-drive, prefferabley ones that run at 7200 RPM's or more and that are compatible for a Mac mini OS X Server, i7 2.66 ghz quadcore processor, 8gb RAM, 2 x 2 TB-HDD.


Now I know i already have enough system hard-drive space and a spare with in the machine itself, however both drives run at 5200 RPM's and I do not want to record onto the system drive itself nor the spare, i will be using that for other use.

Looking for external equipment that will run at 7200 RPM's or more, compatible for the system that I currently am waiting on arrival for.

[TruestPain]

I also have questions about the differences between the FireWire (400/800), Thunderbolt and SDD's ?

[TruestPain]

Also... a point in the right direction for the least noisy externals OR enclosed storage devices.

[TruestPain]

bump

[Craig F]

these are a good choice http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firew...W800_FW400_USB

[TruestPain]

Copy. Thank you sir.

[John_Toolbox]

Originally Posted by TruestPain

I also have questions about the differences between the FireWire (400/800), Thunderbolt and SDD's ?

Speed is the primary difference. Note that everything gets advertised differently, Megabytes(MB) or Megabits(Mb) can easily be confused so I'm listing everything here in MB.

There are two speeds you need to be aware of:

1. Actual speed capability of the drive itself(Read Speed and Write Speed)

For spinning disks, obviously A 7200 RPM drive will be faster than a 5400RPM, etc. A bigger cache is also always better.

For SSDs, there are no moving parts, so the comparison is strictly how fast they are, the type of flash memory they use, the controller, etc. You realy need to read the specs of SSDs before buying, the performance between various makes and models can be very different. Annandtech has some great articles that will explain what to look for when buying an SSD.

2. Theoretical speed limit of the bus you are using:

FW400 = 50MB/s
USB 2.0 = 60MB/s*
FW800 = 100MB/s
Gigagbit Ethernet = 125MB/s
SATA II(3.0Gb/s) = 375MB/s
USB 3.0 = 625MB/s
SATA III(6.0Gb/s) = 750MB/s
Thunderbolt = 1250MB/s

Basically, there will always be a bottleneck. Also be aware that these theoretical numbers are not necessarily what you'll get in a real world scenario. A good example of this is USB 2.0, which is very inconsistent when doing file transfers. Even though FW400 is "theoretically" slower than USB 2.0, it's more consistent and reliable, and therefore better for recording audio than USB 2.0.

Example 1: Put a 500MB/s SSD into a FW800 SATA II case. The SATA II connection bottlenecks the SSD to 375MB/s, and the FW800 connection bottlnecks everything to 100MB/s.

Example 2: Put a 7200 RPM 1TB Drive in a SATA III Thunderbolt case. Lets say the 7200 RPM drive can read and write at 75 MB/s. In this example, you are wasting your money on the thunderbolt case, a cheaper FW800 case would probably be more than the drive would ever handle.

[TruestPain]

John thank you for the specifications and examples of such that I would be looking for and/or should look for when purchasing.

[John_Toolbox]

One more thing, for busses like Firewire, Thunderbolt, etc. you need to add up the number of devices on the bus to determine how much bandwidth each device will actually have available. So as an example, if you have 4 drives daisy chained on a FW800 bus, and all 4 are reading/writing simultaneously, each drive theoretically will only have 1/4 of the available bandwidth, or 25 MB/s. However, if you have 4 drives connected, but only use one at a time, the one drive you are using will operate closer to the 100MB/s bandwidth of the bus.

So while the speed of thunderbolt seems oversized for a single SATA II SSD, it will work great with 4 SATA II SSDs, since each SSD should theoretically have around 300MB/s of bandwidth available.

Keep in mind that I don't have any real world experience with thunderbolt, so I'm just going by what I have read about it. There may be limitations I'm not aware of. But it is definitely faster than anything else, other than PCIe.

[TruestPain]

I do have a PCIe connection I believe.... I'll have to go back and look but i'm certain I do.