Elgato Thunderbolt Ssd 120gb

Elgato’s drive is one of the simpler and more affordable ways to add Thunderbolt storage.

That’s partly because it uses a single drive arrangement. But rather than a hard disk, it uses SSD technology, as popular rise by the MacBook Air, which is based on flash memory with an advanced controller. So, despite its compact size and relatively low capacity, it packs serious performance.

Magnetic anomaly. Elgato’s monolithic portable drive eschews hard disk technology, combining SSD with Thunderbolt to good effect

This unit is specifically aimed at mobile use. There’s only one Thunderbolt port, so it has to be the last item in your chain of Thun­derbolt devices. To use a Mini Display Port monitor with your Mac at the same time, you’d need a Mac with two Thunderbolt ports - and that means only the 2 7in iMac at the moment, reducing the appeal of the drive to MacBook users. If you use a Thunderbolt Display or iMac as your second monitor, however, you can daisy-chain through it to the drive.

There’s a good reason for this limitation: unlike the LaCie Little Big Disk, which is also portable, the Elgato draws its power solely from your Mac through the Thunderbolt cable, and thus doesn’t require you to carry an external power supply adaptor or find a mains socket when you want to use it.

Based on a single SanDisk Ultra SSD drive with a SATA-II connection, this was never going to be the fastest Thunderbolt SSD around

Based on a single SanDisk Ultra SSD drive with a SATA-II connection, this was never going to be the fastest Thunderbolt SSD around. Elgato says power and heat restrictions on Thunderbolt drives prevented it from using a faster arrangement. In testing, however, the drive came admirably close to the maximum speed of 270MB per second quoted by Elgato: its average read speed for large files was 269.6MB per second, and its average write speed wasn’t far behind at 257.7MB. Pleasingly, the speeds that contributed to these averages showed con­sistent performance across various file sizes.

This makes the Elgato a good choice for basic video editing and demanding photographic tasks. Your media can reside on fast storage without cluttering up your startup drive. In fact, if your MacBook has a standard Apple hard disk rather than an SSD, the Elgato will outperform it - a remarkable reversal of the traditional objection to using external drives as working storage.

We tested a 120GB model. The 240GB ver­sion costs just a bit less than LaCie’s Little Big Disk of the same capacity. While that drive offers the flexibility of being set up as a RAID stripe for even higher speeds, it would be operating at half its total available capacity in that configuration.

This isn’t the very fastest storage you can buy, which might seem disappointing from a Thunderbolt SSD. But it offers a good balance of price, performance and convenience when you need quick storage to carry with you.

Thunderbolt speed test results

Our large file tests push fast drives to their limits. Both of the SSD-based drives gave fairly consistent speeds when reading and writing. With rates in hundreds of megabytes per second, variations of around 10MB per second are small. The Elgato, the only single-disk unit, gave impressive transfer rates of over 250MB per second, whether reading or writing. The others each contained two disks, and the results shown are what we saw with each configured as a striped array, which aims to reach higher speeds by spreading the workload between the two disks.

Thunderbolt speed test results

LaCie’s Little Big Disk, also SSD-based, exhibited a minor speed variation of 9.1MB per second when writing files; the gap was larger when reading, at 53.2MB per second, though still much smaller than the variation seen in the hard disk-based units. To avoid peak speeds skewing our analysis, we looked at their minimums and averages. Here, LaCie’s 2big was consistent even in its variation, by 46.2MB per second and 45.8MB per second when reading and writing respectively. The WD My Book showed much greater variation, with gaps of 110.6MB per second and 61.5MB per second respectively, and its minimum speeds were by far the closest to a low of 200MB per second of all the drives.

Details
Price	$412 inc VAT; 240GB $686
From	store.apple.com/uk
Info	elgato.com
Needs	Thunderbolt Mac * Thunderbolt cable (not supplied)
Pro	Fast SSD storage * properly port­able * No need to carry an external power supply
Con	Low capacity * no pass-through
Rates	8/10