Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

USB 3.0 Hubs and fast downloads

Tom Gleeson

Tom Gleeson

Well-known member
Joined
Nov 7, 2007
Messages
1,405
Reaction score
7
Points
38
Location
Sydney
Website
www.cinematography.net
Purchasing a new Retina Macbook as I need to speed up data ingesting as a single FW800 port aint cutting the mustard no more. The issue is my Red Card reader is USB 3 and I want to back up to two USB 3.0 HDDs on a computer with only two USB 3 ports. As Reds Thunderbolt card reader has seemingly disappeared I am stuck using only USB 3.0. Is anyone using a USB 3.0 hub to solve this issue? Not sure if the hub could introduce reliability or performance hits? I imagine I will need a powered hub as the HDD will be bus powered.

I know someone will say use a thunderbolt HDD but I transcode on a Mac Tower that only has FW800 as its speediest port. I am not aware of any HDD with both FW800 and thunderbolt connectors while OWC make a HDD with USB3 and FW 800 ports.

And yes I did look at Seagates GoFlex HDD system for interchangeable ports but availability seems quite a mess.
 
Yes that would work but trying to avoid the thunderbolt to FW800 adaptor as that drive would max out at @80MBs while I could expect 100+MBs from the USB 3 HDDs. Just not certain if two USB3 HDD connected to a USB 3 hub would work to their full capacity? The theory says it should but would love to hear what people's real world experience is.
 
I haven't tried USB3 hubs but USB3 mounted Redmag media wont max out over 160-175MB/sec. That should give room for another stream in the bus. But keep in mind it was the same for firewire - That didn't work out so well.
 
Where the hell is a Thunderbolt SSD reader? Looking at 6K by mid year! I really wish I knew what the hell is going on at Red. Bring back the early days where Red communicated with its customers better than anyone.
 
Tom Gleeson said:
Where the hell is a Thunderbolt SSD reader? Looking at 6K by mid year! I really wish I knew what the hell is going on at Red. Bring back the early days where Red communicated with its customers better than anyone.
Click to expand...

agreed.

I am in the same situation. Using the usb3 red mag reader, bus powered. and I have two owc usb 3 bus powered HDD w 2.5 hybrid momentum drives in them.... on the Retina right now I am backing up the my internal drive and to 1 external. A full 256gb takes about 25min.
 
Here are some numbers:

USB3 to 256GB REDmag - 180MB/s Read, 170MB/s Write.

A G-tech mini raid connected to USB3 via an eSATA adapter is - 180MB/s Read, 170MB/s Write.

USB3 is capable of ~384MB/s so using 2 backup drives on a hub should theoretically not be a problem as each will have access to 190MB/s bandwidth.

Also a single 7200rpm drive is only capable of a max of around (correction)110MB/s I believe.

So Thunderbolt for single drives or card readers has no advantage other then daisy chaining for this purpose.

I also saw no difference between running through my USB3 Hub and straight into the port.
 
Did RED ever promise this? Jarred said it wasn't on the table because it couldn't be used in the field without power. They did say they may consider this in the future.

Tom Gleeson said:
Where the hell is a Thunderbolt SSD reader? Looking at 6K by mid year! I really wish I knew what the hell is going on at Red. Bring back the early days where Red communicated with its customers better than anyone.
Click to expand...
 
I did one job with USB3 and it was a nightmare!

Drives are fast doing one thing, once you start trying to make multiple copies and do checksums and color correct and transcode USB3 goes to SHIT! 120MB/s drives dropped to 10MB/s.


Dusty
 
Pawel has USB-3 on his (PC) laptop and says he can dump a full 256GB SSD to a single USB-3 drive in about 14 minutes. That's screaming fast. I agree, trying to simultaneously dump to multiple drives in the field is likely to be problematic.

If the transfers were fast enough couldn't you do them one at a time?
 
Dustin Cross said:
Drives are fast doing one thing, once you start trying to make multiple copies and do checksums and color correct and transcode USB3 goes to SHIT! 120MB/s drives dropped to 10MB/s.
Dusty
Click to expand...

I think the situation ITSELF is what slows it down. I wrangled a feature where we had multiple Mac Pros, SATA cards, raids and multiple RedMag readers and it was still painfully slow, mainly due to simultaneous backups with checksums.
 
Jim,

I use esata drives all the time doing the same thing and have never had a problem. USB3 is good doing one thing at a time and complete crap doing more. Sata and SAS work great. They will send as much data as the drives can take.


Dusty
 
Yeah, I never had a problem, but it wasn't screaming. I think R3D Manager slows the process, but adds important checks. Was transferring two SSDs at a time to 3 drives.

Dustin Cross said:
Jim,

I use esata drives all the time doing the same thing and have never had a problem. USB3 is good doing one thing at a time and complete crap doing more. Sata and SAS work great. They will send as much data as the drives can take.


Dusty
Click to expand...
 
Sidney L. Plaut said:
agreed.

I am in the same situation. Using the usb3 red mag reader, bus powered. and I have two owc usb 3 bus powered HDD w 2.5 hybrid momentum drives in them.... on the Retina right now I am backing up the my internal drive and to 1 external. A full 256gb takes about 25min.
Click to expand...

Sidney,

Do you ever have the usb3 red mag reader, bus powered and the two owc usb 3 bus powered HDD running at the same time? Interested if the Macpro can power all three devices at the same time? I am hoping to make two backups simultaneously to two external HDD drives via a hub.
 
jimhare said:
Yeah, I never had a problem, but it wasn't screaming. I think R3D Manager slows the process, but adds important checks. Was transferring two SSDs at a time to 3 drives.
Click to expand...


Jim,

Using R3D Manager did it ever pick up on any significant errors ?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top