Fortysomething Geek

Now this looks like an interesting product coming out this summer. Sonnet will be releasing a Thunderbolt Docking station named the Echo 15 Thunderbolt Dock. It has up to 15 ports of expansion with the ability to add an internal 3.5" HDD along with an optical DVD or Blu-Ray drive.

I'm intrigued because it has all the ports I want in a docking station - eSATA, multiple USB 3.0, daisy chain Thunderbolt/MDP, Firewire and Gigabit. This will start at 400ドル and definitely be price competitive with Belkin and Matrox.

Link: http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echo15thunderboltdock.html


HengeDock also has an interesting traditional laptop docking system. It is a horizontal docking station for Macbooks with availability sometime in Q3 of this year. It has Ethernet, Firewire, audio, USB 3.0 and what looks like 3 mini display ports for 3 external video display.



Link: http://hengedocks.com/order_horizontal_dock.php


I'd personally get the Sonnet Echo 15. It is not tied to one particular device.

A few months back, I blogged about the BlacX 5G USB 3.0 dock and it being one of the few USB 3.0-SATA dock device to support UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol). UASP is a supercharged version of USB 3.0 with an extra boost of turbo. Anandtech noted that the new 2012 Ivy Bridge Macbooks now supports UASP.

With 10.8.2 update, I decided to follow up by seeing if anything has changed using Samsung 830 SSDs.

Today, I tried USB 3.0 booting from an Samsung 830 SSD and I was floored. 12 second cold boot into Mountain Lion. But most importantly, I was getting Thunderbolt speed in the "real world."


Then I ran some benchmarks.
305 MB/s Write on average and 400 MB/s Read.



Thats right. 300/400 MB/s. I still could not believe it so I booted into a few different installs of Mountain Lion 10.8.2. I even tried another Samsung 830. I ran this test 4-5 times with different configuration to see if there wasn't a fluke.


I discounted BlackMagic's speed test and monitored the Disk I/O the Activity Monitor. As you can see, copying and reading 50GB of tests, you can see it reading 400 MB/second. OK, BlackMagic wasn't acting weird.

I then tried my real world test of copying a 30GB Virtual Image .VMDK file.
A 30 GB ( 29.31 GB VMDK to be exact) took 1.33 seconds to copy.




To do the math. It definitely corroborates the benchmark. According to my calculator, it wrote at 300.56048 MB/second in real time. This is not a synthetic benchmark but what you will actually get in the real world.


After reading all of this and you still don't believe me?
I did a video on my iPhone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaHPh5cKmTI



There you have it. This may be the fastest USB 3.0 to SSD adapter setup on a Mac and even PC (unless you have a new rare Gigabyte motherboard with UASP USB 3.0 controllers). These test were done using the Samsung 830 SSDs.

The Blac X 5G is smoking fast with UASP. It appears to have an ASMedia 1051 controller.