ThunderBolt to USB 3 cable anywhere?

[Jeremy Garchow]

We have a few of the older Pro version (3Gb) and they have been all good for years now.

[Dave Gage]

[Andy Neil] “David, question about your eSATA problems. What are your issues exactly?”

Andy,

As I just said in another reply, I will likely move on from eSata because I’ve spent so much time with it with little success and I now edit directly on an internal drive I added as a replacement for the optical drive. It works great and my only use for eSata now is to speed up backups, but it’s pretty much a non-issue at this point.

My experience has been that despite what Apple and vendors like OWC say, eSata via the ExpressCard slot is not “hot-swappable”. I learned this from experience and then spoke with a senior engineer with the Disk Warrior people and he said they treat it like SCSI. I’ve found that when it’s working for me, I must re-boot after using the eSata card or sometime within 24 hours the computer will crash randomly.

But, as I said, for me, this is all moot. I’m using FW800 for backup and a new Seagate 7200rpm Hybrid drive for editing that I added when I removed the optical drive. The internal drive is just as fast as my 2-drive RAID 0 enclosure when connected via eSata and the ExpressCard slot in “feel” and through benchmarks.
—

After 25 years of never losing one single bit of data, I had a Carbon Copy Cloner accident (completely my fault), and wrote over about 8 years of video files, mostly family video. Being way to clever for my own good, I immediately backed up the changes to it’s backup drive. Fortunately, I bought “Data Rescue 3” from Amazon a few days later and it appears I recovered all the files back. After “Disk Warrior”, DR3 is now my second favorite piece of software.

I’ve mostly just been using FW800 for external backups and it’s been fine. But, to run the recovery software on the 2 TB RAID via FW800 would have taken 25 hours. When I connected the RAID via the eSata it said 10 hours which I could live with, but of course the eSata was not rock solid which made me think after this incident I would try to move over to the ThunderBolt port and a TB or USB 3 drive dock. Well, that’s not really going to work either, so I’ll just stick with FW800 until I truly need more external connection speed.

If I do need to go back to eSata, I will take yours and Jeremy’s advice and try the Sonnet Pro card and proprietary drivers.

Thanks,
Dave

[Stephen Hill]

Dave, sorry to branch off your original question but I am interested to know. Did you replace your OS drive with an SSD and then move your original HDD to an optibay? This is what I am planning to do as my 17″ MBP could do with a new lease of life. I have successfully tweaked premiere pro to accept my 330M as MPE device so its already running loads better.

[Dave Gage]

[Stephen Hill] “Did you replace your OS drive with an SSD and then move your original HDD to an optibay?”

Stephen,

I posted this elsewhere a while back, but here’s the original post (with some benchmarks)-
https://www.fcp.co/forum/4-final-cut-pro-x-fcpx/15934-experiences-benchmarks-using-hybrid-2-5-hdd-externally-and-internally

Here’s a quote from it:
“I move around a lot and being able to edit anywhere at any time on my 2011 MBP i7 17” is a huge advantage for me. Because of this I decided to look at the option of removing my Optical Drive and putting in an OWC Data Doubler so that I have a 2nd drive for media always with me (and then I don’t have to drag around an external RAID). SSDs are still too pricey for the amount of GBs you get, so I bought the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid 750GB HDD. I first tested it with FCP X in an external drive dock connected via a 3GB eSata ExpressCard. The editing experience with FCP X felt fine. In fact, it didn’t feel much different than with my 2-drive RAID 1 setup.”

I ended up taking out the Optical Drive and putting my original Apple boot drive (750GB 5400 Drive) in it’s place. I then put the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid 750GB HDD in the hard drive slot which is now my edit drive.

To get the full 6GBs connection speeds internally, you will need to make sure you’ve made this firmware upgrade-
https://blog.macsales.com/11895-2011-macbook-pro-sata-problems-resolved
—

Some Benchmarks:

Seagate Hybrid 750GB internal slot- 6GB connection (Quick Bench “Large file Test”):
[With the “Allow Cache Effects” checked (5ms): Write-270 MB/s, Read- 134 MB/s.]

Internal 5400 Drive original main drive slot: Write- 57 MB/s, Read- 57 MB/s

Internal 5400 Drive (optical drive slot 12/23/12 after firmware upgrade):
[With the “Allow Cache Effects” checked (5ms): Write-90 MB/s, Read- 90 MB/s.]

…I then checked out the difference between the changing my external RAID from a “1” to a “0”:

eSATA OWC Elite-AL Pro 2-Drive RAID 1 3/4 full (Quick Bench “Large file Test” from SpeedTools Utilities 12-24-12)
[With the “Allow Cache Effects” checked (5ms)- eSATA: Write- 97 MB/s, Read- 99 MB/s.].

eSATA OWC Elite-AL Pro 2-Drive RAID 1 EMPTY (Quick Bench “Large file Test” from SpeedTools Utilities 12-27-12):
[With the “Allow Cache Effects” checked (5ms)- eSATA: Write- 96 MB/s, Read- 155 MB/s.]

eSATA OWC Elite-AL Pro 2-Drive RAID 0 EMPTY (Quick Bench “Large file Test” from SpeedTools Utilities 12-27-12):
[With the “Allow Cache Effects” checked (5ms)- eSATA: Write- 96 MB/s, Read- 155 MB/s.]

eSATA OWC Elite-AL Pro 2-Drive RAID 0 1/4 FULL (Quick Bench “Large file Test” from SpeedTools Utilities 12-27-12):
[With the “Allow Cache Effects” checked (5ms)- eSATA: Write- 97 MB/s, Read- 156 MB/s]
—

One last hardware note, I am maxed out at 16GB of RAM, but when I went from 8 to 16GB, I didn’t notice much difference. On the other hand, my job workflow doesn’t really push the limits of the software or the hardware.

I’ve got to run, but let me know if you have any other questions. By the way, I’m broke now and frankly satisfied with the way system my runs, but at some time in the future, I will swap out both the boot drive and the edit drive to SSD. That should be fun and give this 2011 MBP a new lease on life.

Thanks,
Dave

[Stephen Hill]

Thanks. Will take a look at the link now. Whenever I have checked my MBP on the Crucial website it says the max RAM I can install is 8GB which is what I currently have. Seems I have pretty much the same model MBP as you so perhaps I can go up to 16GB. Personally I don’t have to do location work that often but I want to see what performance I can get out of this system before upgrading to a rMBP. The big (and it literally is BIG!) issue is that this 17″ MBP can’t be feasibly used in a plane seat.

[Dave Gage]

[Stephen Hill] “Seems I have pretty much the same model MBP as you so perhaps I can go up to 16GB.”

For the last 5-10 years, I’ve been buying my RAM from OWC. Check to see if your model is on this list-
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/Apple_MacBook_MacBook_Pro/Upgrade/DDR3_1333MHz_SDRAM

My model is the MacBookPro8,3. When I bought it the price was a bit better than now, but $160 for 16GB is still not too bad.

Dave

[Denis Milette]

I have no idea how relevant this topic still is (and I’m a first time poster too!) but for archival purposes, has anyone seen these:
https://www.kanexlive.com/article/thunderbolt-adapters

I have a 2011 15″ MBP so no expantion card available… I’ll be trying them out if/when they do come out.

Cheers

[Chris Ratledge]

according to the reviews on Amazon, the Sonnet Expresscard USB3 adapter is extremely poor, many issues. No hot-swapping, bus-powered drive issues, card doesn’t work in the thunderbolt > expresscard adapter that SONNET makes, random disconnects, fried drives, etc…

From the most detailed review I read:

“1. You have to download the Mac Driver from the Sonnet Website.

2. This SUPPORTS BUS POWERED HARD DRIVES – but you have to buy the optional USB-to-DC auxilliary power cable (available at OWC) and attach it to one of the MacBook Pros’s USB Ports so you can get 500 mA power on ONE of the USB 3.0 Ports, not both. Thus only one hard drive can be bus powered. 500 mA is enough to power most drives and OWC’s Mercury Elite-AL Pro enclosure.

3. The Mac OS X Driver has SERIOUS LIMITATIONS. It only supports USB 3.0 hard drives, Sonnet’s media reader and Lexar’s Compact Flash/SD reader. The PC Drivers works for any 3.0 peripheral.

4. The Mac OS X Driver DOES NOT SUPPORT USB 3.0 HUBS. They do not show up when plugged in. This means I can’t buy 4-port powered USB 3.0 HUBs and run 4 or more external hard drives off of this USB 3.0 adapter. Since NO USB 3.0 external drives allow you to daisy-chain hard drives, this limitation is difficult to accept. It limits the adapter to two external hard drives (one bus powered if you also use up a USB 2.0 port).

5. Another serious limitation is that the driver doesn’t support USB-connected external displays. Since USB 3.0 external displays for the Mac are coming soon and have much better performance than USB 2.0 external displays, this is a serious limitation for a future desired capability. Certainly, the 2012 MacBook Pro Retina Display with built-in USB 3.0 ports won’t have this limitation.

6. Since the current driver does not support non-storage USB devices, this means USB 3.0 scanners won’t be supported either. “

[Jeremy Garchow]

I forgot about this thread.

I finally ordered the Belkin as I finally have a Thunderbolt computer.

The price has come down if anyone is interested. It probably means they are going to release something else soon, but whatevs.

Jeremy

[Michael Hancock]

I noticed the price drop, too. It was actually on Amazon’s Deal Of The Day list at 3am the other morning.

Once you get it and have a chance to test it out, please post a review of it here. I’m about to request two of them for work.

Thanks.

—————-
Michael Hancock
Editor