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Will an external Thunderbolt drive like the Little Big Disk actually have more bandwidth then the internal drives?

Yes. A Thunderbolt RAID configuration could exceed the performance of the two internal drives. However, I am getting 480MBps with either a single OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS or OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G. The current Little Big Disk is half the performance, 8x the storage for the 2TB model at the same price. In other words, the Little Big Disk 2TB has the same performance as Apples SSD but 8x the capacity.
 
Yes. A Thunderbolt RAID configuration could exceed the performance of the two internal drives. However, I am getting 480MBps with either a single OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS or OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G. The current Little Big Disk is half the performance, 8x the storage for the 2TB model at the same price. In other words, the Little Big Disk 2TB has the same performance as Apples SSD but 8x the capacity.

It could exceed the performance of the two internal drives even if they were raid 0?
 
It could exceed the performance of the two internal drives even if they were raid 0?

yes but with a caveat. the lacie can give you around 600MB/s with a pair of sata 3 ssd's this would be better then a pair of any hdds inside a mini and better then a pair of sata II ssds. the mini internal sata jacks are sata III I believe that owc got numbers like 900MB/s with a pair of two sata III ssds. the highest number I have seen for the lacie is 750MB/s with a pair of sata III ssd's... in truth the lacie unit is really good for iMacs as it will allow insane numbers without opening the iMac. in fact if you have a pair of 256gb ssd's in the lacie lets say stata II samsungs you get 450MB/s write read and use the internal hdd as backup. your iMac no longer suffers from the internal trapped disk problem that has plagued it for years.

For the mac mini the lacie is not as important a piece of gear if you are into diy you don't need it too much.
 
It could exceed the performance of the two internal drives even if they were raid 0?

Theoretically two SATA III channels will provide more throughput (6Gbpsx2 = 12Gbps vs 10Gbps) with the caveat of one way. If you are doing upstream and downstream simultaneously the Thunderbolt will win because each channel is bi-directional.

It remains to be seen if one could put two OWC ME Pro 6G drives in RAID 0 in the enclosure. This could saturate the Thunderbolt bus.

Based on the User Manual the Lacie drive is software RAID, which is a disappointment if you are running this in Bootcamp :( Its not an easy way to get ultimate drive performance under Windows 7.
 
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