LaCie pumps more data down USB 3 link
Dual drive uses USB 3 better
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LaCie is prepping dual drive RAIDed storage box delivering up to 275MB/sec across its USB 3.0 link.
The product is the 2Big USB 3.0, with two hard drives, a maximum capacity of 4TB - ergo 2 X 2TB 3.5-inch hard SATA drives - and either RAID 0 or RAID 1 configurations. It uses a dual USB 3.0 SATA and RAID bridge controller from Symwave. The 275MB/sec speed is for burst read transfers of uncompressed video.
LaCie says its fast new box "reaches the highest throughput ever achieved in a USB 3.0 external storage product" and it is faster than the Buffalo HD-HXU3 single drive external storage box and its up to 130MB/sec figure. The LaCie claims indicate that the reason for slow USB 3.0 link performance in single drive products is largely down to the SATA drive's inability to pump data fast enough through the link, or, indeed, receive it. Having two drives streaming off data pushes more data down the USB 3 pipe.
We don't know the intermediate capacity points for LaCie's USB 3.0 2Big and neither do we know the prices yet, but it will come with both PC and Mac backup software. LaCie and Symway will demo the box at CES 2010 in Las Vegas in January.
LaCie says it "will launch a full range of [USB 3.0] products in the coming months." Good-oh. ®
COMMENTS
So...
not really 4TB is it?
More like 3.72TB before filesystem overhead.
There is no file system overhead.
There is no significant capacity lost due to overhead.
They are using different units of measurement.
Hard drive manufacturers consider a TB to be one trillion bytes.
Most operating systems report a TB to be 1024^4 bytes.
Its like the rope manufacturers are selling rope by the foot. But you are measuring it in meters, dividing it by 3 and wondering where the missing rope went.
USB 3.0 is not the bottleneck.
I should make it clear. USB 3.0 is not a bottleneck here; it's the speed at which the drives can pump data into the USB 3.0 pipe, which is why multi-drive USB external storage arrays are a good thing in terms of bumping up deliverable I/O speed through the wire.
Chris.
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