What is the fastest external access storage?

Budget?

Interface (USB2.0, USB3.0, Firewire, Thunderbolt)?

If you could live with 2TB the Western Digital My Book VelociRaptor Duo is fairly quick, but it should be for £600+. :)
 
Thunderbolt would be good but:

It's more expensive
Not much out there
You're not going to see speed improvements (outside of benchmarks (very little in it)) compared to USB 3.0. They're both capable for transferring data faster than a standard single hard drive can operate, the hard drive will be the bottleneck.
 
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It is more than just moving blocks of data, it is more like accessing, reaccessing, writing, reading back and forth constantly.

Each photo is 30mb, the library can have tens of thousand of them and I like to flick between them as fast as I can. (32G of RAM already planned and sitting here).

First plan was to get the WD dual HD RAID enclosure with 2x 3TB drives with Thunderbolt. This should be fast. I have a spare external USB 3.0 drive that I can set to mirror as back up. This will give best of both worlds.

This is £450 + my own 3TB HD which was £130 so total cost is £580.

The more expensive solution but with more flexibility is to get a Drobo 5D.

Hot swap HD
BeyondRAID technology - Mix and match HD sizes
5 Bays
Thunderbolt
SSD card capability for speed boost

Currently it can take 20TB of drives in its current firmware, in 1 drive redundancy setting should hold around 15TB easy.

This however will be mega expensive, at a 3 drive initial set up will be £660 + £450 = £1110.

On top of the above, I already have a Drobo FS which is my backup volume and will be backing up anything above.
 
RAID0 isn't what you want for storage

If you had a 100mb file, in RAID0 on 4 drives, there'd be 25mb of the file on each drive, so it can read it really quickly.

But if one drive has a hiccup, you lose all data :D



RAID1 = makes a copy of the file on another drive, so 4x 1tb would be 2tb storage with 2tb 'backup'

technically, RAID0+1 would be better here, 2TB striped storage with 2TB striped backup

RAID5 is the 'best', but you need 3 or 5 drives for it to work properly

http://www.ibeast.com/content/tools/RaidCalc/RaidCalc.asp
 
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On the topic of speed, USB3 vs Thunderbolt, I received rather interesting results today when my LaCie Rugged 256GB Thunderbolt / USB3 SSD arrived and tested with my Macbook Air.

USB3 - 241MB/s Write, 436MB/s Read
screenshot20121219at164.png


Thunderbolt - 250MB/s Write, 381MB/s Read
screenshot20121219at150.png


StevenG
 
Strange, they should be pretty much the same, your thunderbolt is being lazy for some reason.

If your going to RAID then I'd suggest 0. It's damn fast and easy. Regardless of redundancy, or lack of, always have a backup. 2x2Tb + 1x4Tb for backup and have done with it?
RAID 5 or 6 is great for large arrays and when you want to get a broken array back up quickly.
 
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