- Usb 3 card for mac pro 2010 for mac#
- Usb 3 card for mac pro 2010 pro#
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- Usb 3 card for mac pro 2010 mac#
During the tests the onboard fan noise was noticeable initially but not to the point of distraction. Overheating is something that can often lead eventually to drive failure so keeping it cool is a necessity, especially in a drive like this which is designed to be faster than your average USB drive. Rather than just relying on heat sinks though, the drive also features a temperature controlled fan that ensures it only turns on when it really needs to, keeping things quiet for as long as possible. What’s inside is more important though and my drive came with a 32MB cache buffer on a 7200rpm 1GB drive. It certainly looks the part, definitely not your average desktop external drive. When the drive arrived the first thing I noticed was the build of the case itself, very sleek and solidly made aluminum with a heat sinking deign on the side and ventilated front plate. So a comparative firewire test was also of great interest to me because not everybody has USB 3 yet. One thing that CalDigit claims is that not only does it have the speed of USB 3.0 but it also has much faster Firewire 800 speed than other drives. No extra peripherals at all, just the drive and the computer. All tests are performed with ONLY the test drive plugged into the computer.
Usb 3 card for mac pro 2010 software#
Using a piece of software from AJA I tested the read and write speed of the the CalDigit drive using USB 3, USB 2 and Firewire, and compared it with a few other drives that I already have.
Usb 3 card for mac pro 2010 pro#
In other words when Apple finally does incorporate USB 3.0 ports natively you will see even greater speeds that those that I can achieve with this setup.įor my comparative testing I used an early 2009 Macbook Pro running OSX 10.6.4 and connecting the AV drive to my Macbook Pro using the CalDigit Expresscard USB 3.0 adapter.
Usb 3 card for mac pro 2010 mac#
Furthermore, because the Mac does not natively include a USB 3.0 port my testing will be done with the Expresscard adapter and so speed will also be limited by the architecture of the Expresscard standard too. Read speed is also always faster than write speeds and even the speed that one Mac transfers through it’s port will be different to that of another Mac model. Given that there are also no eSATA ports on any Mac computers, it’s probably fair to say that most creative professionals are using Firewire 800 on their Mac external storage devices at the moment. In other words USB 3.0 leaves USB 2.0 standing in the dust, and is also considerably faster than eSata and leagues ahead of Firewire 800. You will NEVER actually be able to achieve these kinds of data transfer speeds BUT it does allow you to get some relative comparison. What is very important to note here is that these are theoretical values of the standards. When you are working with digital photos whose file sizes are in the hundreds of megabytes and video files in the tens of gigabytes a faster file transfer speed is always a welcome improvement!įirst up I think its important to have a rudimentary understanding of the other interface speeds out there:
Usb 3 card for mac pro 2010 for mac#
Mac compatible ports and their own drivers for Mac OSX. Understanding the benefits of the USB 3.0 standard to creative professionals, CalDigit did the smart thing and created their own solutions. In which case what are Apple waiting for ? Only they know. Some say that Apple are waiting for the Light Peak standard to become available, but whilst Light Peak may be the new Firewire, it seems foolish to think that all general computer peripherals will not simply switch from USB 2 to USB 3, as the ports are backwards compatible which is much easier for consumers to deal with. Yes even the new $5000 12-core Mac Pro does not come with a USB 3.0 port. PC desktop computers is not such a problem as third party PCI cards are available but Apple have yet to integrate USB 3.0 drivers into their operating system or offer the ports on any of their hardware. The problem is though that computer manufacturers have so far been much slower in adopting the standard on their desktop and laptop machines. External drive manufacturers are slowly making the switch and mainstream players like LaCie and Western Digital all have USB 3.0 drives available now. I have been patiently waiting for the much newer USB 3.0 standard to filter down into the marketplace. On top of this they simultaneously released a Mac compatible PCI USB 3.0 cards as well as an Expresscard USB 3.0 adapter for Mac laptops with expresscard slots. A couple of months ago storage solution specialists CalDigit announced a new addition to their external drive lineup, the USB 3.0 packing AV Drive. On top of a need for reliable storage space I’m always looking for a way to speed up my workflow and hence spend less time in front of the monitor. With digital camera manufacturers pushing megapixel and file sizes higher and higher, and HD video becoming the norm, we are constantly in need of more hard drives. Let’s face it, we all spend more time at our computers than we want to these days.