{"id":12067,"date":"2011-09-27T11:11:52","date_gmt":"2011-09-27T16:11:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/?p=12067"},"modified":"2017-08-22T15:10:56","modified_gmt":"2017-08-22T20:10:56","slug":"thunderbolt-display-data-transfer-speed-testing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/12067-thunderbolt-display-data-transfer-speed-testing\/","title":{"rendered":"Thunderbolt Display – Data Transfer Speed Testing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>We were pretty exited to receive our first few Thunderbolt Displays yesterday. If you want a closer look – we released some unboxing photos<\/a> before we started our testing. We set off to see just how good essentially the world’s first Thunderbolt hub performs – not to mention the only way so far to add FireWire compatibility to your MacBook Air.<\/p>\n

We’re pleased to announce that for read speeds across the board, whether plugging in via USB or FireWire 800, there is no speed degradation whatsoever.<\/p>\n

With FireWire 800 write speeds though, we found an interesting anomaly<\/em>.<\/p>\n

When running a FireWire 800 external drive hooked up to the Thunderbolt display, there was roughly a 3-5MB\/s slowdown in write speeds versus the same drive plugged in directly to the FireWire 800 port on the host machine. Admittedly, that 3-5MB\/s is quantitatively not that large of a difference, but when the interface itself maxes out at roughly 80MB\/s transfer speeds – that 3-5MB equates to a 4-7% total difference, which can seem significant. USB speeds remained constant and did not show any slowdown.<\/p>\n

Here’s an example:<\/h3>\n

Although test results were consistent across each machine (testing was performed with a 2011 model iMac, Mac mini, & MacBook Pro) we’ll show some of the results from our iMac testing here.<\/p>\n

Test one shows the baseline results. A FireWire 800 drive (our OWC Mercury Elite AL Pro mini<\/a> with an Oxford 944 chipset hosting a 40GB Mercury EXTREME Pro 3G SSD<\/a>) Results are as expected – full saturation of the interface bus…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In Test Two, we attach our Apple Thunderbolt Display and use that same drive via the FireWire port on the Thunderbolt Display. In this example there was nearly a 4MB\/Sec drop in average write speeds…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Now with Test Three, here’s when things got a bit interesting. We daisy-chained a second display to see if this slowdown would decrease given an extra level of passthrough. It did exactly the opposite. We got full saturation again in every instance…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So if you’re looking to squeeze every last little bit of performance from your FireWire 800 devices, we’d suggest using the native port on your 2011 Thunderbolt-equipped Mac or, if your pockets are deep enough, opting for that second Thunderbolt Display.<\/p>\n

MacBook Air owners, not to worry, we tested the USB & FireWire 800 interfaces for you too! Sure enough, plenty of bandwidth for USB and FireWire 800 read speeds, but write speeds were just a bit slower as with the other machines… and remember, the MacBook Air doesn’t support a second Thunderbolt Display.<\/p>\n

Results from the MacBook Air…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We were pretty exited to receive our first few Thunderbolt Displays yesterday. If you want a closer look – we released some unboxing photos before we started our testing. We set off to see just how good essentially the world’s first Thunderbolt hub performs – not to mention the only way so far to add […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":867,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[119,339,3766],"class_list":["post-12067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-benchmarkingperformance","category-product-spotlight","category-testing-lab"],"yoast_head":"\nThunderbolt Display - Data Transfer Speed Testing<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"We see just how good the world's "first" Thunderbolt hub performs - not to mention the only way to date to add FireWire compatibility to a MacBook Air.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/12067-thunderbolt-display-data-transfer-speed-testing\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Thunderbolt Display - 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