Re: External Hard Drive question

[Chris Blouch]

Couple things here.

As far as shared drive formats, most thumb drives come preformatted as 
Windows FAT32 which works under OSX as well. If the drive was formatted 
Windows NTFS or the like, as previously mentioned, OSX can only read the 
drive but not write to it. Likewise if you format it as MacOS Extended 
Windows won't be able to read it. So if you want your hard drive to work 
for both you'll need to reformat it as FAT32. If you erase the drive 
using OS Disk Utility they call it "MS-DOS FAT". Problem is that if you 
already have data on the drive, formatting is going to wipe that out, so 
best to do this from the getgo. I didn't research it but I suspect there 
are some performance or other limitations using FAT32 instead of native 
MacOS Extended.

As far as interface performance you might also want to consider Firewire 
(or IEEE 1394) which is 800Mbps. Now USB2 has a theoretical throughput 
of 480Mbps but in real world use there is a lot of overhead which makes 
even Firewire 400 faster. I'll paste an article URL at the end here 
where tests were made but the end results was that FW800 was 30-50% 
faster than USB2. The second article claims that USB2 drives max out at 
around 40MB/s while firewire can hit about 90MB/s. Where this starts to 
get messy is with thunderbolt and USB3 because you start to hit the 
limit of what the hard drives can do. So USB3 supposedly can hit 150MB/s 
but only the top 5 of 46 avaialble hard drives tested by tomshardware 
(3rd link) can even read that fast, not to mention write (which is 
usually slower). So for Thunderbolt, which has a throughput of 1000MB/s 
per channel and up to 20 channels, it just doesn't matter because no 
single drive could fill that pipe, assuming your computer could even 
keep up. So Thunderbolt usually is going to employ the fastest hard 
drives and often times multiple drives to give the greatest throughput 
for, say, HD video editing or gene sequencing. For everybody else a 
firewire or USB3 drive should be plenty fast. One other nice thing with 
Firewire is it also supplies a good bit of power (about 45 watts) so 
there are firewire drives out there which require no other power source. 
USB is limited to about 5 watts of power which is good enough for 
keybaords and such but not enough to spin up a hard drive.

Hope this helps.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/185415/article.html
http://www.everythingusb.com/comparison.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hdd-charts-2012/-01-Read-Throughput-Average-h2benchw-3.16,2901.html

CB

On 4/14/13 10:52 PM, Ricardo Walker wrote:
Hi,

I was thinking the same thing.  Keep in mind, these speeds are theoretical.  
I'm pretty sure you won't come close to seeing them in real life.  And 
honestly, I'm not certain those speeds are even worth that kind of money unless 
your job really depends on it or, you just have a lot of disposable cash around.

hth

Ricardo Walker
rica...@appletothecore.info
Twitter:@apple2thecore
www.appletothecore.info

On Apr 14, 2013, at 8:28 PM, John Panarese <jpanar...@gmail.com> wrote:

    Yes, it's far faster than USB.  I think 2x 10 GB a second bidirectional, 
though I don't know if that holds out in real world use.

Take Care

John D. Panarese
Director
Mac for the Blind
Tel, (631) 724-4479
Email, j...@macfortheblind.com
Website, http://www.macfortheblind.com

APPLE CERTIFIED SUPPORT PROFESSIONAL FOR MAC OSX LION

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On Apr 14, 2013, at 7:30 PM, "Jesus Garcia" <jesusga...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yes certainly they tend to be more costly, though from what I have seen
lately the difference seems to have narrowed, my biggest reason is the write
read speed of thunder bolt if correct as to the advertised speed seems to be
considerably better then even USB 3.00. Regardless thanks for taking your
time to answer my question.
Jesus Garcia

-----Original Message-----
From: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com
[mailto:macvisionaries@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Panarese
Sent: Sunday, April 14, 2013 19:08
To: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: External Hard Drive question

   There are some Thunderbolt drives out there, but they tend to be a bit
more expensive.  If you take a look at Amazon or just do a Google search for
Thunderbolt external hard drives, you will get an idea of their costs.  They
tend to be around twice or more the cost of USB HDs.


Take Care

John D. Panarese
Director
Mac for the Blind
Tel, (631) 724-4479
Email, j...@macfortheblind.com
Website, http://www.macfortheblind.com

APPLE CERTIFIED SUPPORT PROFESSIONAL FOR MAC OSX LION

AUTHORIZED APPLE STORE BUSINESS AFFILIATE

MAC and iOS VOICEOVER TRAINING AND SUPPORT



On Apr 14, 2013, at 7:02 PM, "Jesus Garcia" <jesusga...@gmail.com> wrote:

Okay thanks I thought that format issues may be the problem, but since
the thumb drives and SD cards have no problem I thought perhaps the
external hard drives behaved the same. I am considering purchasing a
thunder bolt capable drive to use exclusively with the Mac any ideas
as to which would be best? My mac book pro hard drive is 360 gig so I
don't need more than a 500 Gig drive.

-----Original Message-----
From: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com
[mailto:macvisionaries@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Panarese
Sent: Sunday, April 14, 2013 18:37
To: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: External Hard Drive question

Was the drive formatted in Windows?  If it is NTFS, it will only be
read only on the Mac.  You will need to buy a product like Paragon
NTFS to enable the Mac to write to NTFS formatted drives.


Take Care

John D. Panarese
Director
Mac for the Blind
Tel, (631) 724-4479
Email, j...@macfortheblind.com
Website, http://www.macfortheblind.com

APPLE CERTIFIED SUPPORT PROFESSIONAL FOR MAC OSX LION

AUTHORIZED APPLE STORE BUSINESS AFFILIATE

MAC and iOS VOICEOVER TRAINING AND SUPPORT



On Apr 14, 2013, at 5:43 PM, Jesus Garcia <jesusga...@gmail.com> wrote:

Evening list members, I have a puzzle I can create folders, and copy
files
perfectly fine to a thumb drive, SD card, but when I try doing the
same to an external hard drive I cannot do so. The drives both appear
in the finder, and I can open the folder and file list view, but I
cannot create a folder or copy from the Mac hard drive to the
external. These external drives are USB drives and I would like to use
them both on my Mac book pro and on my windows machine. What am I missing?
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