Alex Gerulaitis
Forum Replies Created
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[Andy Mees] “Just for reference, according to specs the Tbolt connection can deliver 10W of electrical power … ie enough to power a 3.5″ Hard Drive”
Maybe a 5400rpm one? Black Caviars eat 10.7W at read/write, not including peak consumption at spin up and enclosure overhead (power and activity LEDs).
Alex
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[Nate Stephens] “But if the SSD drives are the only drives that can take full advantage of the throughput speed, up goes budget.”
Almost any RAID will take advantage of it as few external interfaces out there are fast enough to out-pace the speed of 3-4 striped HDDs.
SSDs take advantage of the bus power (single TB cable), in a way 3.5″ hard drives can’t – and of course, superior speeds. I’ve seen a single 6G SSD running at over 4Gbs – two of them striped will over-saturate even a USB 3.0 connection.
Alex
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[Steve Modica] “The sense of this is backwards. The cards “creates” a PCIE 4X slot. It wouldn’t sit in one. It is a 4X slot (in the form of a plug). I don’t know what the back end is (perhaps it bolts onto the northbridge directly).”
Take a look at the Intel diagram I linked above (top of page 3). It shows TBolt being a 4x PCIe device sitting on top of Intel PCH that also plugs into the DisplayPort.
The other clue is that the data portion of TBolt spec is basically a 4x PCIe extender, with the addition of daisy-chaining and a few other things.
Alex
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[Sean Kapleton] “With BMD video card, GTX285, Dreamcolor / HDlink, etc I invested roughly 10k into a home setup for learning & home based work but now it seems I might be behind the times in 6 months or less.”
There is nothing in Thunderbolt that makes your system obsolete or even outdated. For storage, it’s MiniSAS that’s still much faster. For displays, you already have DisplayPort.
Yes, TB makes for a nice connectivity option with those tiny cables – for laptops, maybe. Even then: no solution is shipping yet, and for every TBolt storage box there is another one with ExpressCard/34 connectivity.
Alex
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[Steve Modica] “I’m pretty sure this is essentially PCIE 4X coming out in a port”
That’s what Intel says too on their “Example PC System Diagram” – but I can’t figure out if the chip they are “making available to the industry” can be used to make a pure PCIe adapter, i.e. something you could stick in a 4x PCIe slot on a Mac Pro (or forgive me for this transgression: Z800) and have a ThunderBolt port (data only, I assume) on it.
It’s the DisplayPort part of TBolt spec that worries me – if required, it may make such a PCIe-to-Tbolt adapter impossible as an add-on PCIe card.
Would you agree?
Alex
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[Emanuel Ach] “Where can I see how much speed requires each stream for DV and HD or Prores?”
Here is one calculator:
https://www.digitalrebellion.com/webapps/video_calc.html
Just put “1 second” in “Video Length” field, and that will give you the required raw bandwidth.
Alex
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[Emanuel Ach] “So the box with the hardrives will connect to a mac which will be the server and from there we should be able to connect through fiber optic at least 3 but maybe 6 macs.”
Do you already have fibre optical adapters in your Macs, SAN management software, switch, wiring?
If not, you’d probably want to contract a SAN specialist (like Bob Zelin) to do a full installation and configuration, as SAN configuration and management isn’t as simple as, say LAN.
That would be the first priority to figure out; the box – secondary.
Alex
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[Nate Cooper] “…a 4 or 6 bay Thunderblot locally attached RAID. The ‘Sustained Data Transfer Rates’ are spec’d as ‘Up to 800MB/s’ curious to see what that will actually do on a laptop.”
Probably in RAID0 and only on a 6-bay box. RAID5 and 4-bay boxes – at 20-25% lower each?
Alex
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[Peter Wiggins] “One would think that thunderbolt MacPros won’t be far behind”
I have a feeling there will be PCIe-TBolt adapters for under $100 (maybe even under $50), shipping within 2-3 months.
Alex
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Somewhere on this forum is Matt Geier of Small Tree – manufacturer of multi-port NICs designed to improve networking for editing and streaming purposes – a sure-fire inexpensive way to improve station-to-server transfer rates.
Alex
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