USB 3 and iMacs

[ExXB]

I have a 2009 iMac. Was having a look at what was available in 'the sales' and I saw a number of external HD's preformated for Macs, but using only a USB 3 interface. i.e. No firewire, no ethernet.

Well, my iMac has only USB 2, and while I know it will connect to USB 3 devices, it would be at USB 2 speeds.

AFAIK there is no way to upgrade the iMac to USB3 but is there another solution?

There were some very good deals on 2 and 3tb drives, but these would be painfully slow at USB 2 speeds. I was surprised that on devices purported to be for Macs, they don't pick up compatibility with older machines.

[Bushfiva]

I think you just have to buy the right drive... I don't know if Seagate Goflex for Mac is still a thing. But FireWire started being retired in 2012.

[Mac the Knife]

You can still find Firewire external drive cases around.

Poke around the usual places on the Net.

Mac

:ok:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/External_Drive_Solutions
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Description=firewire%20enclosure&Submit=ENE

[Booglebox]

Firewire 400 is only slightly faster than USB2. In fact USB2 is 480mbps on paper, vs 400mbps for Firewire, but Firewire is more efficient so the real-world speed is slightly higher.

LAN would be fastest, but you need to get a NAS fast enough to actually push data to you at gigabit speeds (most of them are CPU-limited to much slower speeds).
Good NASes can get expensive, to the extent that I gave up and bought an old tower PC for 90 quid (quad-core Opteron!) and put 6 hard drives and a second gigabit network card in it. With Windows Server 2012 R2 NIC teaming and RAID6, voila: super speedy reliable access (but maybe a bit overkill for your needs).

[mixture]

Firewire 400 is only slightly faster than USB2.

The iMac 2009 had Firewire 800... :p

iMac (Late 2009) and iMac (Mid 2010): External features, ports, and connectors - Apple Support (http://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201994)

(most of them are CPU-limited to much slower speeds).

CPU limited ? Most of the cheap ones home-users buy have nasty slow drives in them too !

With Windows Server 2012 R2 NIC teaming and RAID6, voila: super speedy reliable access (but maybe a bit overkill for your needs).

Oh yeah... until recently I had a dusty old second-hand HP MSA 1000 with 14 x 15k drives and dual hot-swap raid controllers and power supplies :E

That thing was built like a brick crapper I tell ya, the only thing that needed occasional replacement were the drives, the rest of it ran like Swiss clockwork, I tried to kill it with seriously risky stuff like live online firmware upgrades, but it still wouldn't die ! However times have moved on and modern stuff uses less energy and runs quieter ! :cool:

So to your cruddy old Wind-blows tower, I say :yuk:

[mixture]

ML115

ML100 series ?

Wouldn't touch one of them with a bargepole, certainly not bulletproof. They're only there to enable HP to capture the people who buy on price, trying to stop them going over to old Smell who specialise in selling tat to that end of the market.

The ML100's aren't terrible, but they're nowhere near as robustly built as their elder cousins up the range.

ML300 series or above, definitely bulletproof. You could be forgiven to think they line them with lead sheeting given their weight !

[ExXB]

Ya, it's got FW800 but only one port. Shouldn't matter as you can daisy-chain up to 24 FW800s devices - except for the two iOmega FW drives I got on the cheap a couple of years ago. 1 FW800 port and 1FW400 port. So I could connect them, and the end of the chain, but the later one's speed would fall to USB 2 speeds.

I understand that new Macs have USB 3. I was just surprised to see in the Mac section of the shop these large (to me) 1 and 3tb drives purported to be for Macs when they would only really work (at decent speeds) on more recent Macs.

On a slight variation - can anyone recommend a good (i.e. it actually works) Firewire (800) hub? Or a FW to ethernet (if such exists). Just really want to tidy up my desk and hide some ugly cables.

Many thanks for all of the replies, so far!

[Booglebox]

The ML100's aren't terrible, but they're nowhere near as robustly built as their elder cousins up the range.

ML300 series or above, definitely bulletproof. You could be forgiven to think they line them with lead sheeting given their weight !

I quite agree, build quality is no contest. It does work quite well though. But nothing compares with my old XW6400 which really was a tank.

We have a couple of ML330s at a branch office with 400+ day uptimes (not bad for Windoze :}). They are also really very quiet indeed (especially with SSDs).

[Mac the Knife]

"Good NASes can get expensive, to the extent that I gave up and bought an old tower PC for 90 quid (quad-core Opteron!) and put 6 hard drives and a second gigabit network card in it. With Windows Server 2012 R2 NIC teaming and RAID6, voila: super speedy reliable access."

Or you could use FreeNAS - FreeNAS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeNAS) which is free, highly capable and enjoy the pleasures of BSD and a ZFS pool with whatever old hard drives you have running around. Even a single-core system will cope quite happily if your demands are not excessive.

And FW800 is a LOT quicker than USB2 as well as daisy-chainable (you don't need a hub).

Mac

[mixture]

ZFS pool

Just remember, ZFS is not the holy grail.

There are many aspects of ZFS implementation detail that can have the capability to **** on you from a great height in terms of the integrity of your data if you don't do it right. ITS NOT just a case of going "oh hey, I'll just reformat this lot as ZFS".... this is not EXT4 with a bit of LVM...

If you're working with consumer-grade hardware you have to be doubly careful, because that sort of stuff makes many assumptions on behalf of the non-techie. Consumer-grade also has somewhat different failure modes to the commercial stuff, and ZFS needs consistent, fast and predictable failure modes.

And even if you get your implementation right, a bug can still ruin your day, just ask the BBC who were one of the first "big names" to jump on the ZFS bandwagon ... legend has it they came very close to loosing a shed-load of data and required much handholding by the gurus at Sun to get the ship upright again.