New external drive choices -- what's best for Aperture?
Hi. Hardware, I'm sorry to say, generally makes my head hurt.
Today Apple's delayed Thunderbolt-to-FW800 adapter made it appearance in Apple Stores.
Purchasers of the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display (rMBP) now have a nearly full set of options for using external drives with Aperture. I had been using a stable of FW800 drives (with my MBP 5,5). I'm looking for recommendations on what to upgrade to.
(Aside: I've been too busy to post a comment recommending the rMPB. It's my main Aperture machine (I use Aperture every day, but work in two different locations) -- I'm _very_ happy with it. Highly recommended. My machine is 16 GB RAM and 500 GB SSD. But there's still this ports problem ... .)
The options I know of:
- use the new adapter and use the old FW drives. These can be daisy-chained, as before. Afaik, the total throughput is limited by what TBolt allows (which may be more than enough).
- move drives to USB3 enclosures. I did this as a stop-gap measure while waiting for the adapters. I got my enclosures from OWC. The drives are not daisy-chainable. The rMBA has two USB3 ports.
- buy eSATA hubs and use the eSATA ports on the drives. This one just became available. Expensive, imho. Not sure how the Mac will handle it (I always have Originals referenced to external drives; I sometimes have Libraries on external drives).
- move drives to TBolt enclosures. These are slowly coming on the market. They are very expensive (imho).
- replace the drives with TBolt drives. Also very expensive.
- replace the drives with USB3 drives
I'm looking for a reasonable middle-term (3-5 years) solution. Fwiw, I'm not convinced that external drive throughput is even an issue with running Aperture. It seem to run well on my rMBA even when a large library is connected via USB2. (I assume Aperture is good at taking advantage of the 16 MB RAM and the SSD "scratch drive".) I need to have one USB2 port, and one TBolt port, available at all times (various peripherals; the TBolt is for external monitors).
Thanks!
Good stuff. Thanks. Agree in principle re: "TBolt for displays; USB3 for storage".
I did get a USB 3 hub. (Amazon link. There is a 7-port hub as well.) Highly recommended (at least for rMBP users). This works well with how I use Aperture: I have several external drives with mostly Referenced Originals and some Libraries. Since I rarely use more than one of these at a time, it doesn't matter that the hub throughput is limited to a single USB 3 channel. The USB 3 hub, for me, functions as a quasi-data-server for Aperture, and takes up only one of the two USB 3 ports on the rMBP. (Fwiw, with the rMBA I don't think there's much reason for storing Referenced Originals on a fast drive; because of the efficiency of the way Aperture caches, USB 2 may be fast enough. I haven't measured this yet.)
I mentioned eSATA only because almost all my external drives came with eSATA ports and cables. I have never used eSATA. At this point, I don't plan to.
I have moved a few drives into USB 3 enclosures (purchased from OWC). With the USB 3 hub, and the newly-available Apple TBolt-FW800 adapter (which supports daisy-chained FW devices), I am no longer in any practical way limited by the four ports on the rMBP (2x TBolt, 2x USB 3). Whew.
I backup my system drive wirelessly to a Time Capsule every night (by design, the machine doesn't have access to the TC during the day when I'm working), and use SuperDuper to backup all Libraries and Referenced Originals to specific sparse bundles kept on leap-frogging external drives, with one always off-site. At this point I make no practical distinction between FW800 and USB 3 drives for back-up, as they are all fast enough and the back-ups run unattended. (But USB 3 seems to be much faster.)
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which of these 3 would you recommend for my
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Message was edited by: Thomas Bryant -
New External Drive connected to Time Capsule moving files problem
I have a late 2009 13" unibody MacBook Pro, that I primarily use for video editing/converting. I use my Time Capsule as a network through which I can connect to my external hard drives via USB for videos and such. I've used at least two other external hard drives along with my Time Capsule for a year and a half with very few problems, aside from the inevitable crash of one. Before yesterday, I had a 1TB Western Digital MyBook (http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=210) and a 2TB Verbatim Desktop HD (http://www.verbatim.com/prod/hard-drives/desktop/usb-2.0/) connected through my 1TB Time Capsule and aside from the Verbatim drive being rather sluggish most of the time, everything was working fine.
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When I restarted, I opened up finder to access the drives through my Time Capsule, and it "failed to connect" to my Time Capsule. So I went back into my office to flip the switch on the surge protector in order to restart the process. I turned on my computer and I had no problem accessing my hard drives... Until I tried to move an episode of United States of Tara into the iOmega hard drive. This time, it said, "192.5 MB of 202.6 MB - About 5 Seconds" and completely stopped moving again. And the same thing happened when I clicked the little grey "x" to cancel the move.
I repeated the process several more times with no luck. Then I thought it might help to see if it does the same thing with documents. So I dragged just a random document to the iOmega and it took about 30 seconds, but it did it successfully. So I tried to move the episode of The Killing again and I let it go for, like, 25-30 minutes. After this time, I got a notification from finder saying, "Finder cannot complete the operation because some data in "[the file]" can't be read or written. (Error Code -36)". Then when I went back into the "Shared" part of the sidebar to go back into my Time Capsule folder, it said "Connection Failed"
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Thanks for any help anyone can give me!
- AlexI have attached the macbook to the tc via ethernet cable. Should I turn off my wireless connection or will itunes recognize to go with the faster connection on it's own?
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How to partition a 2TB external drive to use with TM for a 250GB backup?
My MBP only has a 250GB hard drive, but the new external drive is 2TB. I don't want to use the whole ext drive for TM back-up so what size should I create the TM backup partition so that I can use the rest for regular file storage? I saw a guideline in the FAQ that said you need 2-3x the size of the data back-up for TM. So is 500GB for TM and 1.5TB for storage a good size?
Separately, will TM recognize to use the correct partition once they are re-sized and there is a new partition on the ext drive?
Thanksvpr80 wrote:
is 500GB for TM and 1.5TB for storage a good size?
i'm backing up three Macs to my 500 GB TC.
who needs two year old files ... let TM start clearing out the old junk earlier.
JGG -
How do I tell Time Machine to add a new external drive to be backed up?
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