Thunderbolt 2

How much speed increase will I get from a Thunderbolt 2 as my external drive. My current set-up is a Mac Pro to a LaCie 6tb Thunderbolt 1 set as raid 0. I work mostly 2k video (1080p). Should I stay with LaCie 2big Raid thunderbolt 2 for my upgrade?
Thanks
Jim

Switching to Thunderbolt 2 itself will not provide a speed boost to your LaCie 6tb. You either need more HDD's or switch the drives to SSD's.

The limitation is not the Thunderbolt 1 vs. 2 pipe; rather a limitation by the number of rotational drive spindles in the two disk raid.

Jim wrote: How much speed increase will I get from a Thunderbolt 2 as my external drive. My current set-up is a Mac Pro to a LaCie 6tb Thunderbolt 1 set as raid 0. I work mostly 2k video (1080p). Should I stay with LaCie 2big Raid thunderbolt 2 for my upgrade?
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According to this MacWorld test there is very limited benefit: www.macworld.com/article/2601342/lacie-2...test-connection.html

The Lacie 2big Thunderbolt (whether 1 or 2) is a two-drive hardware RAID array you're using in RAID 0. To get faster I/O performance you need more drives.

You should first evaluate whether you *need* more I/O performance. For H264 HD material the I/O load is not that high. Transcoding to optimized ProRes 422 might increase this by a factor of 8, but that is still within that drive's capability (about 300 MB per sec) -- for a single stream.

If you plan on multicam with ProRes 422, you might need more I/O, likewise with 4k ProRes. A good alternative is the OWC Thunderbay 4: eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/Exte...ive/OWC/ThunderBay-4

H.264 has higher i/o demand than ProRes. The whole GOP has to be read off the drive every time one frame is assembled. ProRes just reads the one frame. In our studio's tests over the years, Long-GOP puts more strain on every part of the system, over ProRes.

I can't do multicam Long-GOP on my rMBP, even with SSD T'bolt. But I can do it with ProRes much better. ProRes Proxy is great for it.

BenB wrote: H.264 has higher i/o demand than ProRes. The whole GOP has to be read off the drive every time one frame is assembled. ProRes just reads the one frame. In our studio's tests over the years, Long-GOP puts more strain on every part of the system, over ProRes....

There is no question H.264 puts major strain on the system but in my experience this is more CPU than I/O. I think a key purpose of Long-GOP encoding is to reduce I/O (at the cost of CPU) so it will fit within transmission and storage bandwidth. Each GOP is compressed so that most of the original frames are not even there, only difference info (called predicted frames). On playback the missing original frames must be reconstructed by the CPU, which is very challenging for editing software.

This can be easily measured using FCP X and Activity Monitor. If I play an H.264 4k video using original media, the I/O rate is about 2.8 MB/sec as shown in Activity Monitor. Likewise the total bytes read by the FCP X process matches the byte count of the H.264 file.

However if I transcode that to ProRes optimized media, then play it in FCP X, Activity Monitor shows a 58 MB/sec I/O rate and total bytes read for the FCP X process matches the ProRes file size shown within the library package's Transcoded Media folder.

Note: to get accurate numbers it may be necessary to temporarily disable Time Machine and Spotlight indexing.

Hi Jim,
DigiGal is right, you won't see any real differences between TB1 vs2 for a 2hdd RAID 0. You would need about 10 7200rpm hdd to saturate a TB1 bus. Even 2 ssds will not saturate a TB1 bus.
The difference you see in the link Joema provides is most likely due to different controllers/firmware and cache on the drives themselves.
You could substantially increase the throughput speed by installing ssds instead of hdds but this would void your warranty. LaCie voids all warranties unless you buy your drives and caddies from them.
All 2 drive hdd RAIDS also experience some slowdown due to "seek" times of the drives themselves, which is why you see an improvement in transfer speeds with more cache on drives. Also the chips sets on the drives play a role.
You are very unlikely to surpass the bandwidth needs unless you are editing 4K multi-cam and lots of effects. But the 2 drive RAID 0 will only be capable of around 300-325MB/s at best for reading. This goes way down as the drives fill up. Keep them at least 15-25% empty.
There is a benefit to using a 4-8 drive disk array as each drive will push data more efficiently and throughput goes up. If you are inclined to buy an new device, then go for more bays, otherwise save your $$$.
While codecs play a role in data demand, the drives themselves is the issue here.
Here is an article by Larry Jordan about configuring your system to meet your needs. Still pretty good as general overview to calculate data streams vs transfer speeds. www.larryjordan.biz/app_bin/wordpress/archives/2559

Hope this helps, Greg