HDD raid set up for my macbook pro - Speed difference between usb 3 & Thunderbolt?

[Eirik Nicolai Heim]

HDD raid set up for my macbook pro - Speed difference between usb 3 & Thunderbolt?

Hi!

I have a mac pro from 2012, and the newest macbook pro. I do the heavy stuff on upgraded mac pro, but would like to do a fair amount of editing on the road.

If I go for thunderbolt, I would have to copy it to a disk with an interface that works with the mac pro before getting my projects on the mac pro.

I do not afford a SSD raid at the moment, and I would also like a raid that is about 8 or 12 TB.
If I use spinning disks, will there be any difference in write/read speed with a raid 0 using either USB 3 or Thunderbolt? Do I need thunderbolt then?
If I can use USB 3, I can also us it on my old Mac Pro, and transfer my project to the internal raid.

Anyone?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Thunderbolt 2 is capable of going 3.5X faster than USB3.0. And real-world speeds tend to mimic this. That said, you can still get over 400MB/s in real-world performance from USB3.0 when at its best. However for 8~12TB in a smaller RAID, you're going to be running at no more than 500MB/s anyway, even over Thunderbolt because you're only going to be using 3 or 4 disks. And it may just be an ideal solution here given that you want to share between the Mac Pro and a Macbook Pro on a limited budget. There are other ways to deal with transfer of data. You can always go with a Thunderbolt solution and then use your Macbook Pro as an intermediate system when transferring to the Mac Pro.

Example: Mac Pro connects to MacBook Pro via USB3.0 -- MacBook Pro connects to Thunderbolt RAID while operating in Target Disk Mode. Mac Pro sees storage on Macbook Pro as USB storage devices.

Most of the new small RAIDs hitting the market are Thunderbolt 2 based. Unfortunately, there are not too many with both Thunderbolt and USB3 ports on the same box. However, there are a few. You may want to take a look at this guy: http://www.drobo.com/storage-products/5d/

I have not been a fan of Drobo in the past, but their newer products, especially the Thunderbolt / USB3 offerings have been reasonably good.

If you don't already have one, you will need to add a USB3.0 card to your Mac Pro.

 

[John Waterman]

You can get an OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual - 2 Drives RAID-0. http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/External-Drive/OWC/Elite-Dual-RAID
These have both USB-3 and Thunderbolt ports. Capacities up to 10TB.