Thunderbolt –> eSata adapter ??

[Ron Priest]

Oh I see, well the standard Echo TB adapter is going to have to do for me I believe, as I don’t want to shell out another $169 for it but for someone just making their purchase the Echo Pro would probably be a better choice unless they don’t need all that speed. In that case, I have a TB Adapter I’ll give them a good deal on… say $100 plus shipping.

Ron Priest
Videographer
Louisville, KY

[Rory Newman]

I’ve got a new iMac and an old MBP which doesn’t have an express card port.

This is what I was considering:

Getting the Lacie Thunderbolt to eSata hub, which allows 2 x eSata ins, and has 2 thunderbolt outs for daisy chaining/display port etc.

You can get Verbatim 2TB drives (£85) that have both eSata and USB 2.0 connectors. This would mean I’d get eSata speed editing on the new iMac but could still plug into old USB 2 Macs like my MBP, my mates’ the colleges’ etc.

Any thoughts?

Lacie say that as each eSata port can take up to 3 Gb/s, you can have 2 drives and if both are running then that’s 6 Gb/s theoretical max.

So if I bought 2 drives, could I stripe them together to create one Raid 0 drive and have superfast read/write speeds?

If I then took these drives and plugged them into an old mac via 2 USB 2.0 ports, would they show up as one Raid O drive and thus give me faster speeds?

Help appreciated.

27″ iMac 3.4ghz i7 16GB Ram

[Adam Chesbrough]

What type of speeds are you getting. I have the same setup and am getting:
read: 84mb/s
write: 200mb/s

The read is a major drop from when I would go directly into the expresscard of my 17″ MBP which sustained around 180mb/s read/write

I too went with the echo thunderbolt adaptor so I could utilize the tempo pro card that I already have. I spoke with sonnet and they said that because my HD RAIDs are controlled internally I would see a performance increase with the 6gb/s card (doesnt support port multipliers). I really need to 200+ if I want to take full advantage of the new computer.

What are your thoughts/experiences?

Macbook Pro Retina
2.6GHZ i7
16GB RAM 1600MHz DDR3

OWC 4TB RAID0 (using esata)
Tempo SATA Pro ExpressCard/34 (3Gb/s)
Echo ExpressCard Pro Thunderbolt Adapter

[Ron Priest]

I’m getting around 180+ read and write but that’s with the Tempo SATA Pro 6Gb ExpressCard/34 (not to be confused with their older 6GB card) and the Echo Thunderbolt adapter (Not the Echo Thunderbolt adapter Pro would probably get faster speeds if I had the Echo Thunderbolt adapter pro and a hardware RAID0 versus the software RAID0.

Ron Priest
Videographer
Louisville, KY

[Adam Chesbrough]

Thanks Ron, so it looks like my issue is the 3gb/s expresscard. I am just wondering if it makes sense to wait and purchase a 6gb/s hub when it comes out. I imagine that I will get similar speeds to what I am seeing now with the lacie 3gb/s hub.

Macbook Pro Retina
2.6GHZ i7
16GB RAM 1600MHz DDR3

OWC 4TB RAID0 (using esata)
Tempo SATA Pro ExpressCard/34 (3Gb/s)
Echo ExpressCard Pro Thunderbolt Adapter