So… the cool thing about these new TB displays is that they have ports on the back… 3 USB ports, 1 FW800 Port and 1 Ethernet Port.
What that means is, if you plug it into a 27” iMac, you now have a desktop machine with 2 Firewire ports again.
After setting up one of these things I had to do some speed tests. if you copy a lot of data between FW drives, you probably came across the fact that daisy chaining drives together is a drag because you slow your data down to HALF the FW800 theroetical limit.
I did some experimenting and by plugging ONE drive into the newly “aquired” FW800 port on the back of the new TB display I don’t quite DOUBLE my speed but its faster.
I made a folder with 5GB of crap in it for my experiement. By plugging one drive into each port (one on the iMac and one on the TB Display) these were my times
1:11 FW800 on iMac to FW800 on TB Display
1:50 Daisy Chaining FW800 Drives together.
On giant long copies… that will make a difference… I’ll take it!
NOW… for Thunderbolt Speeds…
:27 for the same 5GB folder from a Lacie 1TB Thunderbolt to a Pegasus 12TB Raid