Can games be run off a Thunderbolt Drive?

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Level 1

8 points

Can games be run off a Thunderbolt Drive?

Hello people.

I'm currently waiting for my new Mac Pro to arrive. (Feels like forever, especially as my current 2008 Mac Pro is dying, making work very slow and tedious.)

In my spare time I'd like to be able to play Elder Scrolls Online, however 60GB of HDD is quite a chunk of the 250GB the new Mac Pro comes with.

I have a Drobo 5D Thunderbolt DAS. Will I be able to put Elder Scrolls and other games on the Thunderbolt DAS and run them off that or will the drop in performance be too great?

Thanking you in advance.

Mac Pro, iOS 7.1

Posted on Mar 23, 2014 1:56 PM

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Answer 1

RatVega™

Level 4

2,005 points

Mar 23, 2014 3:35 PM in response to iso250

Each Thunderbolt port can support 1.2GBytes/sec of transfer... That should cover you.

(A "cheese grater" Mac Pro with a SATA 2 system drive gets about 100MBytes/sec; that's why everyone is so excited about SSDs.)

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Answer 2

iso250 Author

Level 1

8 points

Mar 23, 2014 4:11 PM in response to RatVega™

So that would mean if the connection is running at 1.2GBytes/sec and the DAS has a 72000rpm SATA drive in it then it should technically be able to run the game at the same data transfer speed as a cheese grater with a 7200rpm SATA internal drive?

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Answer 3

Mar 23, 2014 6:04 PM in response to iso250

There is no drop in performance using a ThunderBolt connected drive. Each Channel on a ThunderBolt-1 provides a 10Gigabit/sec connection (1,250 Megabytes/sec) and ThunderBolt-2 can combine both channels for twice that speed.

The limitation is still the spin rate of the platters. A 7200 RPM single drive can typically source data off the platters at about 125 MBytes/sec or thereabouts.

The fastest single SSD drives are about 800MBytes/sec.

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Answer 4

iso250 Author

Level 1

8 points

Mar 23, 2014 7:21 PM in response to iso250

I'm not the most knowledgable about external storage and you've both set my mind at ease. Thank you both very much!!

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