articles/Storage/graid-page2

G-RAID with Thunderbolt - part 2 of 1 2 3

by Mark McNamee Published 01/06/2013

The new kid on the block is the super-fast connection called Thunderbolt (formerly Light Peak), which is a product for Mac, developed jointly by Intel and Apple. Thunderbolt has maximum theoretical data transfer speeds of 10 gigabits per second (Gbps). This is double the speed of its main rival, USB 3 (Superspeed USB), which transfers data at 5Gbps - itself more than 10 times faster than a USB 2 connection.

Thunderbolt is also 12x faster than Firewire. Thunderbolt, therefore, is at the cutting edge of transfer speeds, demonstrated by Intel's claim that a full-length HD movie can be transferred via Thunderbolt in under 30 seconds.

The G-RAID systems are compatible with both USB 3 and Thunderbolt. There are complications when using NTFS Windows formats on the Mac, as we found out transferring across platforms - it soon kills any benefits because of the need to translate the data format. Our test was simple and practical, and posed the question. 'How long does it take to transfer a file of images from a real job?' In this case the 'real job' was a social celebration and consisted of a mix of RAW and JPEG files in a single folder: 2.97GB, 311 files in two folders. We also transferred a 100MB file around, which would lie somewhere between a Nikon D700 and D800 TIFF file in real terms. Initially we used a USB 2 pen drive to move the files onto the host computers. The USB 2 transfer, out to the pen drive from a PC took 17 minutes but felt like 17,000 minutes! The folder read into the MacBook Pro in 3m 07s and was then transferred to the G-RAID in 49s (write) with read back of 40s. The equivalent transfer to and from a USB 2 laptop hard drive was 1m 25s and 1m 28s. All this suggests that it was the USB 2 interface that was choking the system. The timings are important physiologically. At around the one to two minute mark you will most likely sit there, when it climbs to 17 minutes there is time to go for a cup of tea, but you might be itching to get on with other work in which case a 17 minute transfer will seem like an eternity.

We also transferred the folder from Mac SSD* to G-RAID (NTFS Format) in 6m5s compared with G-RAID to Windows Laptop (USB 3) in NTFS in 22 seconds and copying from a Windows Laptop** to G-RAID (NTFS) in 27 seconds. In other words translating from a Mac via NTFS (the Windows standard) is very slow.

Please Note:
There is more than one page for this Article.
You are currently on page 2

• G-RAID with Thunderbolt page 1
  
• G-RAID with Thunderbolt page 2
  
• G-RAID with Thunderbolt page 3
  

Contact Mark McNamee

1st Published 01/06/2013
last update 21/07/2022 08:46:24

More Storage Articles

There are 0 days to get ready for The Society of Photographers Convention and Trade Show at The Novotel London West, Hammersmith ...
which starts on Wednesday 15th January 2025