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Blackmagic multidock 10G for editing?
updated 1 month, 1 week ago
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16 Posts
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Thank you for the response, Neil. As a courtesy to those who might come across this post and wonder what happened, I share an update. And I’m a bit embarrassed to admit it.
Long and short, the LaCie <b style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”>does work just fine with my footage. I’m not going to call it crazy fast, but good enough for my fairly straightforward needs. Where I went wrong? I plugged my thunderbolt cable into the wrong port of the darn drive. I saw three ports, didn’t look carefully, they all appeared to be the same, and so I used the one that was most convenient.
<b style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”>Turns out that was the USB 3.1 port. The other two are TB. (Separate question: what’s the point of having the USB 3.1 if it’s slower??) Anyway, once I switched to using one of the two TB ports, my performance went up ten-fold. BTW, I’m using regular old MXF files, so nothing to demanding.
<b style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”>Thanks all for sharing your thoughts. And I still like the idea, someday, of getting something like the Blackmagic dock.
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That’s such a common mistake that on some LaCie Units, I have taped off the USB port so that someone doesn’t plug a Thunderbolt cable in it. LaCie hasn’t make it any easier by spacing the ports equally and having a small (non 40-plus eyes friendly) symbol below the port so its hidden once one connects a cable.
For this particular (2-bay RAID0) drive, its speed should be nearly the same over Thunderbolt 3 vs USB 3.1. Provided, one uses a Thunderbolt 3 cable with a Thunderbolt 3 port, and a USB-C cable with a USB-C port. The Mac’s Thunderbolt 3 ports double up as USB-C ports, but work as USB, and have optimal USB 3.1 speeds only with USB-C cables. Preferably the supplied USB cables.
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Helpful again! So speed should be the same if TB cables are aligned with TB ports and the same for USB. Did not know.
Of course, this STILL leaves me with questions. Don’t feel obliged to answer…mostly rhetorical questions…I might try to find answers on Google, though likely that will leave me more confused 😀
If the speed can be the same betweenTB and USB, why have two?
Difference between USB C and 3.1?
My MacBook tells me I have thunderbolt 4 ports. Does that make my TB connection faster than USB 3.1?
My MacBook ports doubles as thunderbolt and a USB if understand correctly. BUT for greatest speed, I should be using them exclusively thunderbolt? In other words if I went from my computer’s TB port WITH a USB cable to Lacie USB port (TB>USB>USB), that would be slower than going TB>TB>TB?
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Thunderbolt 3 (40Gbps) and USB 3 (5 or 10 Gbps) have different top speeds, but the 2×3.5″ SATA hard drives that you use inside this LaCie dock, as RAID0 would give you a top speed of 500 MB/sec, or 4 Gbps. Either port can manage this speed.
But both types of ports are provided because, as Glenn correctly pointed out, some systems may not have a Thunderbolt 3 port, or have one free, so the USB port can be used.
The other reason is, this is a dock. It also has CFast and CFExpress card readers built in. These can read at 500 to 800 MB/sec. And there’s a hub USB 3.0 port where you could have another drive or an SSD connected. And there’s a display port where you could have a monitor hooked up.
Assuming you’re using one or both these card readers and the drives, and another downstream drive/SSD, then the combined bandwidth would exceed USB, so then a Thunderbolt 3 port would be faster.
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Ah, now all of this is beginning to make sense. BUT if the SATA drives only deliver 500 MB/sec at RAID 0, then it shouldn’t have really mattered if initially I was plugged into the USB 3.1 rather than the thunderbolt, right? (assuming I wasn’t using any of the other ports, which I wasn’t)
For the last couple of weeks, I was doing fine with my thunderbolt to thunderbolt. And then, out of the blue yesterday, the drive was super-laggy. I had to wait for it to get up to speed and play over, and over, and over… There was even a delay while I waited for it to copy a puny little photo file from my desktop to the LaCie.
The fact that you are a frequent LaCie user makes me think:
1) you’ve never had lag problems with your drives; and
2) maybe mine is flawed and should be sent back for a replacement!
Beyond being a 4K project, the thing I’m working on is super-basic. Quicktime H264 and MXF files. Stringing together soundbites. That’s it.
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