Sonnet X8 and the Kona 2 Card…Slot 3 & 4???

[Ned Soltz]

I have the Kona 2 in Slot 4 and the Sonnet X8 in Slot 3. Works great.

Ned Soltz

[Bob Zelin]

I believe that Sonnet actually recommends putting the card in the PCI100 slots only (2 or 3). You will get the amazing performance in one of these 2 slots. I warn you in advance, there is a “trick” to getting those eSATA cables to seat correctly, and I have suffered many hours thinking that the Sonnet doesn’t work, simply because I never seated the cables correctly into the card.

Bob Zelin

[Andy Edwards]

Been there too Bob with my Sonnet 4X4 card. I spent hours with a spread sheet checking different configs, just to get all my drives to mount. All I really had to do was hit the SATA cables in harder with a sledge hammer…just kidding. You really have to shove them in so hard to make sure the connection is right though. Once I had a firm connection with all the cables, all my drives showed up.

BTW, did you get good speed results using the 8 drive config? Is it trully fast enough for HD work? Sure seems like a price saver compared to a full blown X-Raid.

Have you seen Macgurus new 8 bay case with swapable drives?
https://www.macgurus.com/productpages/sata/Burly8RHS.php

Andy

[Bob Zelin]

Yes, when I have seen the 8 drives actually working, the AJA benchmark test (Kona System Test) shows 410-420 mb/sec, which outperforms the XServe RAID. It is scary, and CHEAP. Reliable – I don’t know. The 8 bay I tested came from Maxx Digital 714 374 4944. If you decide to order it, just make sure you can get your money back, just incase something goes wrong. But there is no question that this is the “next generation” of storage – even if it winds up being SATA 2 or SATA 3.

Bob Zelin

[Ned Soltz]

I have written a review on the lafcpug site about my very positive experiences and high data rates with the x8 and 8-drive raid based upon 2 4-drive MacGurus Burly Boxes and 8 Hitachi 250 SATA drives. This is blazingly fast and it has been able to handle 8-bit HD through the Kona 2. Scary thing is that this is Raid 0– no redundancy, and pure risk. One thing I strongly recommend is using SoftRaid to control the raid once you have formatted with Apple’s Disk Utility.

Ned Soltz

[Brian Tetamore]

Thanks a lot guys for the info.

As a matter of fact, I’m on my second attempt to get all four drives to show up. I’m up to three, so hopefully one more check of the cables and I should be there.

Thanks Again

[Bob Zelin]

Brian –
you are going thru the experience that I went thru. You THINK that you have all the cables plugged in, but one or more of the drives dont show up, and you say “gee, do I have a bad cable, do I have a bad drive?”. I would take my “working system” over to a client, and I could not get all the drives to mount – you can imagine that when they are RAID 0 with 8 drives, you must get ALL the drives to mount to even see the array, so you can see my frustration on this.

Please let me know if you had success with getting all the drives to mount, and if you wouldn’t mind, when you get everything working, please disconnect everything and try it again, and see if you have “consistancy” with plugging this in, or if it makes you “suffer”. I would love to know.

Please remember that you can do this with power on, so you don’t need to shut down your computer, and reboot each time. you can seat and reseat these cables while “hot”.

Thanks –
Bob Zelin

[Gary Taylor]

Hi Bob,
I am also interested in this card but these problems are making me nervous. Do you have any info on CPU utilization? I know that on the PC side RAID cards have wildly varying CPU utilizations?
Thanks in advance,
Gary