Internal HDD vs External

Patroklos

I have a Mac, its pretty quick.

I have a solid state external drive connected with thunderbolt, its as quick as it gets, some say faster than the internal HDD.

Yet, if I save to and then load scenes from the external drive, everything crawls at 1% - not kidding!

I don't want to clog the internal drive, I want to use the external drive, whay is it so slow - what can I do to speed it up?

Thanks

Totte

This sounds very strange, but if you use the Activity Monitor and look at "harddrive" you casn see the read speed. It can be that the drive isn't as fast as it says. Is that thunderbolt or thunderbolt II btw, thunderbolt is only fast, thunderbolt II is screaming fast.

 

Patroklos

I have solved it! The external drive given me by a friend is not as he said, it is a (not very quick) HDD, rather than an SDD.

For those interested in such things, Blackmagic on my Mac gives the following readings;

Mac internal hybrid drive;           Maximum 275/670* MB/s (W/R) continuous down to 30/70 for 2k files.  (Wow - what a difference for small files - so forget MB/s when measuring Hybrids & SSD's and look at Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) instead!!!!!!

WD Red 2TB External;               Maximum 140/150 MB/s (W/R) continuous down to  14/16 for 2k

WD My Passport Pro;                 Maximum  95/100MB/s (W/R) continuous down to  10/10 for 2k

As for the connection speeds, I got this from Techradar ".....USB 2.0, which tops out at 480Mbps. eSATA can deliver 6Gbps (older versions deliver 1.5Gbps or 3Gbps), USB 3.0 runs at up to 5Gbps and the USB 3.1 should do 10Gbps. Thunderbolt can do 10Gbps. Thunderbolt2 is 20 Gbps."

*Note; 1 Gbps = 125 MB/s  (a la convertme.com) That is really interesting because 670Mb/s equals 5.35 Gbps which is right at the limit of what USB3's can deliver. Therefore a hybrid or SSD drive will require USB 3.1, eSATA or Thunderbolt conection if very large files are to be transferred at full speed - though of course most files are smaller and speed might not be affected.

Totte

OK, then it was even worse. USB compared to thunderbolt or firewire is much slower, as all traffic on a USB chain goes from Device-A -> Host -> Device-B, while on thunderbolt or Firewire400/800 the traffic goes from Device-A -> Device-B while at the same time you can have traffic from CPU -> Device-C.