05-01-2011, 10:37 AM

I love using the Seagate external 1.5T drive. With the FW800, it is noticeably faster than the internal drive.

But, it is 14.5mm thick and the internal is 9.5mm thick. If it will fit in either the hard drive bay or the Superdrive bay, I would like to rip it out of its container and slip in in there.

Does anybody know if a 14.5mm drive will fit in either bay?

05-01-2011, 11:14 AM

Just noticed this note from OWC - looks like the 1T drive which is 12.5mm will fit, but only in the left side bay, not in the optical drive bay. A 14.5 would definitely not fit, since that is thicker than the exterior body . Looks like we have a limit of 1.0T for the next several years, since that is the upper limit of current disk drive technology.
OWC DDMB5KT1.0 DIY Kit: Data Doubler + 1.0TB 5200RPM... $169.99 at OWC

05-01-2011, 11:47 AM

Seagate I believe recently announced a 4tb desktop drive which mean a patter density equal to a normal sized 1tb laptop drive ergo a 12.5mm 1.5 so I would think it would be months not years till we start seeing them.

05-01-2011, 03:37 PM

Originally Posted by thurstmw

Seagate I believe recently announced a 4tb desktop drive which mean a patter density equal to a normal sized 1tb laptop drive ergo a 12.5mm 1.5 so I would think it would be months not years till we start seeing them.

WOW that would be out of this world. If they can get a good read/write count on them, then imagine the life a Mac then.
Will be forever backing up, but no deleting of data of the Machine itself.

05-02-2011, 10:24 PM

Yep, 1.5T would be an amazing amount of stuff to be able to carry around. Adding one to a system that has a 500G SSD and 16G of RAM would make for one amazingly stocked Mac 13'r.

I needed to take the drive apart anyway so that I could put it into a toaster style USB enclosure. Whilest it was naked, I plugged it into another computer's SATA adapter and took some speed measurements using various interfaces with QuickBench...
USB2 = 42MB/sec
FW800 = 73 MB/sec
SATA = 112 MB/sec

Those are all maximum speeds for sequential operation (speed increases with test block size). Read and write were the same.

As you can see, the interface speeds do limit the capability of even a single disk drive rather severely. It's a good thing that this drive enclosure has pluggable EIDE and USB 3.0 options as well. However, random read/writes are much less impressive at about 15 MB/sec, which wouldn't be affected at all by even the slowest interface.