HDD,SSD and the nMP

[Johnsyounger]

Funds just cleared for 8 core,512,32,D500. No word from Apple but status says still ships in Feb. That gives em till the end of the week....
Anyway my old set up is 2 7200 1tb internal, a 2tb external 7200 and a couple of 500 gig random drives. Then a have a 4tb for time machine. Ive sold my old rig for 1500(Mac3,1, 16 gig, 2 1tb, and 2 20 ACDs, extra cards etc, which i think is a pretty good deal). I do mainly motion graphics and editing (AE, Cinema4d, PS, FCP etc) . So long story short I'm going to spend the 1500 on storage.
Ive looked at the Samsung 840 EVO 1tb 499.00 with the Seagate Portable thunderbolt adaptor for 85.00. Was thinking maybe 2 ?? Or possibly a GRAID 8th for time machine and one of the 840s. I looked at the WD 10k rpm drives but I've had friends that claim they are unreliable. Lacie is no good as far as I am concerned. Any other alternatives I am overlooking? Suggestions?
Thanks

 

[JQuick]

I have not purchased any thunderbolt enclosures yet, but I am probably still 2-3 weeks away from my own nMP delivery so I am not in a rush.

I looked at the Seagate portable and desktop TB1 adapters. They may suit you, but I found few items that ruled them out for me. I'll share them in case they matter to you.

They were designed for Seagate's line of Backup Plus drive modules. They appear to work with the EVO drives you are interested in but with some caveats.
1. Because the Backup Plus modules are a nonstandard size a reviewer on Amazon reported that he had to use a spacer to shim the drive to get it to seat properly, then use a pair of cable ties to hold the SSD and the portable adapter together. He was satisfied and it seemed to work well for him, but be forewarned that it may involve a kludge.
2. I have read that these seagate adapters do not support firewire booting. So if you wanted to keep one or more bootable copies for emergency or for testing OS releases, this does not appear possible.

According to their website the G-raid devices do not support booting either. The manuals for the single bay G-drive with thunderbolt and G-drive pro models each refer to partitioning to "set up a multi-boot environment". I think the only difference between these two is that the pro has 2 thunderbolt 1 ports for daisy chaining while the other has only a single port.

The Akito Neutrino Thunder Duo, 2-bay enclosure is known to be bootable over thunderbolt, though their website says it is not compatible with boot camp.

 

[SuperMatt]

Bare Feats has some reviews of external SSDs here:

http://barefeats.com/hard168.html

and here:

http://barefeats.com/hard172.html

 

[VirtualRain]

Funds just cleared for 8 core,512,32,D500. No word from Apple but status says still ships in Feb. That gives em till the end of the week....
Anyway my old set up is 2 7200 1tb internal, a 2tb external 7200 and a couple of 500 gig random drives. Then a have a 4tb for time machine. Ive sold my old rig for 1500(Mac3,1, 16 gig, 2 1tb, and 2 20 ACDs, extra cards etc, which i think is a pretty good deal). I do mainly motion graphics and editing (AE, Cinema4d, PS, FCP etc) . So long story short I'm going to spend the 1500 on storage.
Ive looked at the Samsung 840 EVO 1tb 499.00 with the Seagate Portable thunderbolt adaptor for 85.00. Was thinking maybe 2 ?? Or possibly a GRAID 8th for time machine and one of the 840s. I looked at the WD 10k rpm drives but I've had friends that claim they are unreliable. Lacie is no good as far as I am concerned. Any other alternatives I am overlooking? Suggestions?
Thanks

I have a WD Velociraptor Thunderbolt Duo hooked up to my nMP and it's great. 2TB of storage at SSD speeds for $500. It's also quiet. Not sure why you're concerned about 10K RPM drives... I used them for years in PC builds before SSDs came along and they were very reliable. They are actually 2.5" drives with massive heat sinks that convert them into a 3.5" form factor.

If you really want to go SSDs, then the Seagate adapter is not the best performer if I recall correctly. It's probably fine for casual storage, but I don't think you'll get the full performance out of your SSD with it.

There's really no cheap top performing solutions if you want to RAID0 a couple of SSDs without bottle-necks. There's the Promise Pegasus2 diskless with Thunderbolt2 that will do the trick, or you can get a Sonnet PCIe card in a TB2 enclosure. Those are the best performing solutions I'm aware of, but neither is cheap.

The Promise J4 is a cheaper option for 2.5" drives, but limited by TB1.