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External thunderbolt SSD drives?
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Junior Member
Join Date: Jul 2004
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Looking ahead to acquiring an iMac 5k later this year. Any experience or opinion to keeping movies, pictures etc on a external thunderbolt Flash drive? Or even a HDD thunderbolt drive?
Does the increase in I/O justify the expense? In this case I'd get the 512 internal flash.
I guess there are not many thunderbolt SSD drives available and hopefully less expensive sooner or later.
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Managing Editor
Join Date: Jul 2012
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Mass storage like movies and pictures, I'd keep on rotating media still. Plenty fast.
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: West Michigan
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I've been installing Seagate Hybrid drives in Macs, PCs, Playstation 3s, even in RAID configurations in servers, for several years now. They work very well and are a great middle-road between performance and price. They currently make smaller & slower 2.5" (5400rpm) models (used to make a 7200rpm model but stopped, darn them!), or the desktop versions at 3.5" (7200rpm). (I just ordered another one which I will be installing in RAID 0 in a Mac Mini along with the other one already installed). Both models, last time I checked, had 8gb of solid-state storage built-in (this is all handled in the drive's firmware, to your system it's just a drive, but the firmware in the drive figures out which bits of data you use most often and moves those bits to the "ssd" portion in a process completely invisible to you). They cost a few dollars more than a standard HDD, but often perform much better, and they cost a fraction of what equivalent storage would cost in solid-state form. If I were you, I would spend the extra $ for an external 3.5" thunderbolt case, stick in a 2tb or 4tb hybrid, and you'll be all set with reasonably priced, reasonably fast, and reasonably large storage.
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Managing Editor
Join Date: Jul 2012
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That's a 2.5-inch drive, is that what you're looking for?
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Originally Posted by Mike Wuerthele
That's a 2.5-inch drive, is that what you're looking for?
I use 3.5's on a NewerTech USB drive adaptor with all its wiring for back up, and want to conserve space so took a chance on the 2.5"
Do you consider 2.5" too unreliable?
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Mar 2009
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I have a Lacie Thunderbolt enclosure with the Samsung 840 Evo 2.5" SSD. I cannot think of a better value on the market today.
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Managing Editor
Join Date: Jul 2012
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Originally Posted by pigmode
I use 3.5's on a NewerTech USB drive adaptor with all its wiring for back up, and want to conserve space so took a chance on the 2.5"
Do you consider 2.5" too unreliable?
Nope, that's fine. There's no significant difference in reliability between 2.5 and 3.5 anymore.
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Did a quick 299GB transfer of my iTunes folder, which took about 56min. This in an OCW On-The-Go Pro (USB 3.0) enclosure, with a couple year old left over 2.5" Toshiba MK5061GSYN hdd, which I think is SATA 3.0/7200.
Not that more speed was needed in this particular application, but it leaves you wondering how much time can be saved with a faster external set up.
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: West Michigan
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Thanks for the tip about WD drive availability. According to current metrics WD drives are far more reliable than Seagate over the long-haul, so I'll definitely be giving those a try when I'm looking into 2.5" solutions. Hopefully WD will step-up and make a 2.5" 7200 rpm solution. I've always felt that the 8gb in the Seagate drives was "just a tad too little". 16gb sounds much nicer. Hopefully WD will begin making 3.5" hybrid drives (not their idiotic Dual-Drives which are essentially a software-based solution similar to Apple's Fusion drive. Why *any* company would take something as simple as a hybrid-drive (all firmware based) solution and turn it into something as complex as a Fusion Drive or Dual-Drive is beyond me. All that does is add complexity and failure points. Stupid... Just make a Hybrid Drive with, say, 120GB of NAND and you are all set. That's platform agnostic and simple...)
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Nov 1999
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You have a point, but the Fusion drive has a major advantage, which is that it can prioritize SSD storage by the type of data - system files, applications, etc., while the pure hardware solutions are completely ignorant of content relevance in their decision on what to keep on the SSD.
I don't know how big the actual performance gain is, but I imagine the potential is considerable the better the OS algorithms get and take into account a user's usage patterns.
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Dec 2004
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It would be interesting to see how a Hybrid drive and Fusion / Dual Drive compared in terms of overall performance, but we can't really tell yet since Hybrid drive manufacturers are currently making Hybrid drives to have "the least possible NAND" they can get away with. That's too bad. Currently the Fusion drive definitely out-performs a Hybrid drive due the large "ssd" portion. When somebody makes a Hybrid drive with sufficient NAND storage then a real-life comparison will be really interesting to see.
I will say, however, that I am surprised by the performance of the current Hybrid drives. What they do is boost that all-important "UI Responsiveness" considerably. So even though you are working with an extremely limited portion of your data at SSD speeds, that portion of the data make a huge difference. Commonly-used apps launch as quickly as an SSD, boot times are very fast (not pure SSD fast, but still very nice), recent files usually open instantly. Etc.
(I built my current 15" MBP around a manually managed SSD / Hybrid drive combo (using an OWC optical-drive adapter). I use symlinks to manage exactly which portions of my data I wish stored on the SSD (OS, Apps, and my User/Library folder) and which portion I want stored on the Hybrid (everything else, including symlinks to all other sub-directories that are usually in my "User" folder - Documents, etc. etc.). This is the fastest solution I've yet encountered, but obviously you have to be willing to put the time into making that setup. Definitely outperforms iMacs with a Fusion drive.)
In a few years hopefully this will all be unnecessary and solid state storage will become as inexpensive as traditional drive (keeping fingers crossed).
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Last edited by panjandrum; Apr 6, 2015 at 02:22 PM.
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