mini-SAS on Thunderbolt?

[James Cude]

If a new Mac Pro is in your future- it would make more sense to plan for a Thunderbolt Raid i.e. a Pegasus and get by with something else for now that you could reuse such as a drive with both USB and Thunderbolt. GTech makes such RAIDS. PCI to Tbolt is an option but probably not as solid of performance.

[Brad Bussé]

I thought that USB was no good for video work due to an inherent latency. Has that changed with USB3?

[Jeremy Garchow]

What raid and controller specifically?

If you buy smart, you’ll be able to move your PCIe HBA to something like a Sonnet Thunderbolt PCIe enclosure, allowing you to get more work done now, rather than wait.

I am planning on doing this very thing once we need TBolt connectivity through new MacPros or other CPUs.

Jeremy

[James Cude]

Yeah but why bolt on PCI to Thunderbolt if you don’t have to- all that extra gear, cabling, power needs etc.. Sure it works for older legacy gear but unless you’re planning on blazing through 1080p uncompressed, something like this makes more sense:

https://www.g-technology.com/products/g-speed-q

You get FW800 for the older Mac Pro and with eSATA you could easily go USB3 to on the new Mac Pro.

[Jeremy Garchow]

It all depends on how much storage you need and how fast you need to go.

The pcie enclosure will allow the utmost in flexibility as you can always add cards to it later.

It would allow Brad to get to work now and not worry about a future CPU purchase.

Thunderbolt is gobs faster than fw800, esata, and even usb3, as is mini sas.

It really depends on what brad needs to do. The pcie enclosure will require one more power cable, and a thunderbolt cable, it’s not the end of the world.

[Chris Murphy]

If you built a large array with something, e.g. from ATTO, it should work in a Thunderbolt -> PCIe enclosure. Should. Without someone testing, it’s unknown, but someone will test it and I’m reasonably certain if there are problems found that they’ll get sorted out. The alternative scenario is just too close to a horror show for video on the Mac – let’s face it.

I think the question is, are you needing to actively use a large array now? If you can make good use of it now, then I’d get it now and worry about the compatibility with the next machine later. If you don’t really need it now, then the question is what to use as a stop gap.

With any “large” RAID my concerns are: drive quality and raid card options. That you’re thinking mini-SAS implies SAS drives which tend to be nearline or enterprise and are more reliable than consumer SATA, and that goes a long way to reduced urgency for using a more resilient file system than HFSJ. Better drives don’t totally obviate my HFSJ/NTFS concerns, but it accounts for a lot. Next, whatever raid card you get should explicitly support scrubbing, some of the raid products clearly don’t. You want to scrub the array probably once a month. I know people who do it weekly.

Another way to get around this is look at a non-Mac host for big storage that’s available via 10GigE, and then you can have new and old MacPro that can share the same storage, should you desire an extra workstation which could be useful for transitioning to new hardware. It’s more than a bit more complex since you have all the storage concerns with direct attach, but you also have network concerns, and both have to be done right for network storage. But once it’s working, you walk away from it until something dies. It isn’t affected by OS updates causing conflicts with drivers, you can concurrently use it with more than one computer, you can pick a file system that’s as good or better than HFSJ or NTFS.

So I’d state how big you want the storage to be, what your usage is going to be and hopefully some people with more experience respond. I’d also plan on calling some companies who sell and support such storage, get quotes, and then you’ll be in a better position to make a decision.

[Chris Murphy]

I agree that the PCIe expansion chassis is not elegant. This whole Thunderbolt thing strikes me as benefitting Apple first, and customers second in that at least we’re getting some ability for high speed connectivity rather than none, because Apple long ago decided to be done with traditional desktop hardware. But this is what’s available, so if you want to use OS X the Thunderbolt to PCIe enclosure is the new paradigm unless/until companies come up with a totally different form factor for their products that directly connect to Thunderbolt as the primary interface rather than effectively being adapted to a PCIe slot.

The alternative is go Windows or Linux for video work. *shrug*

Anyway I don’t think the G Speed Q meets the OP’s requirements if he’s considering mini-SAS.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Chris Murphy] “This whole Thunderbolt thing strikes me as benefitting Apple first, and customers second in that at least we’re getting some ability for high speed connectivity rather than none,”

Again, how fast do you need to go?

Thunderbolt is plenty capable for most users, and can support multiple people editing off of the same array.

It is much faster than fw800, esata, and usb3.

It’s 10Gb/sec in one direction. Isn’t 10Gb fast enough?

[Marcus Moore]

[Chris Murphy] “I agree that the PCIe expansion chassis is not elegant. “

Absolutely. But let’s be clear about the use-case for PCIe in the new MacPro- the VAST MAJORITY of people will be using it to connect to legacy hardware that they’re not ready to give up yet. But in the last 2 years most of the major manufactures have started offering TB connects for their products, so it’s not like a PCIe expansion chassis is going to be perpetually necessary in this scenario going forward. Some will continue to need it for a while, but those use-cases will become less and less.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Marcus Moore] “[Chris Murphy] “I agree that the PCIe expansion chassis is not elegant. ”

Absolutely. “

Let’s back up a minute here.

What about PCIe, in general, being ‘inelegant’?

Working on anything PCIe is a jammed up mess. You are cramming stuff into a really heavy computer, you are putting together little tiny connectors in the back of an already crowded computer, usually in to a recessed cavity. Thunderbolt, at the very least, allows you to place those components where it is most convenient, and allows you to take anything apart and remove something without disassembling or moving a big heavy box, which in turn, allows you to keep working even when one PCIe extension isn’t available.

What you see as a negative, I actually see as a positive, but then again I have more than one machine to attend to.