Using a
LaCie d2 Blu-ray XL
with my 2012 imac. The drive supports Firewire 400 and USB2, utilizing the 400 to 800 firewire cable supplied I bought a Thunderbolt port and I'm only getting 3X speeds instead of 6x speeds. Am I doing something wrong?
Very confused
I know I'm old school and refuse to give up my optical drive, but I see no speed improvements over USB 2.0 and thunderbolt to FireWire 400 adaptor. Any help here or do I just suffer with USB 2.0 and return the thunderbolt dongle.
Hi, what is the max rate of the Blu-Ray drive itself?
I believe USB2 & FW400 are faster than most any BR drive needs. 1x Blu-ray is defined as about 36Mbps/4.5 MB/s,
| 12× BR= | 432Mbps/ | 54MB/s |
Serial ATA Interface (Rev 2.6); Data transfer rate: 1.5Gb/sec |
BB wrote:
Serial ATA Interface (Rev 2.6); Data transfer rate: 1.5Gb/sec
That is not the read speed of the drive, that is only the interface speed. In the case of CD/DVD/Blu-ray the interface speed is several times faster than the drive actually is. The physical transfer of the bits off of the spinning disk is the limiting factor.
The speed difference between USB 2.0 and FW400 isn't all that much but FW400 uses far less cpu cycles for the data transfer.
According to several sites the maximum read speed of BD on that drive is 10X (just under 45 Mbytes/sec) which is pushing the limits of USB 2.0 and FW400 but the 3X you report means something is definitely amiss somewhere in the system. It could be a drive problem, a disk problem, or something else.
With my Thunderbolt to FW800 adapter I'm getting about 170 Mbytes/sec transfer from my drives that use RAID 0 mirroring and the limiting factor is definitely the data transfer between the spinning platter(s) and the drive electronic buffer.
Well I did some experimenting burning on an old Mac with a Firewire port and burning the same exact files using the thunderbolt dongle on my new Mac. Turns out that USB 2.0 and Fireware 400 are about the same. Although not getting max speeds as box suggests I guess maybe that drpends on what your burning. The firewire 400 had a very slight advantage in speed so I suppose I will continue using my Dongle. I did however research my drive that Lacie uses and using a PC upgraded the firmware and the drive seems to perform slightly better. Too bad Lacie no longer keeps up with firmware updates as it looks like they stopped doing so a few years ago. I still love the products.
To answer you, it's a 12x burner
LaCie d2 Blu-ray XL Via Thunderbolt
