Andrew Richards
Forum Replies Created
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I’m not naming any names either, but we should all also endeavor to avoid the many other logical fallacies.
Best,
Andy -
Please provide more info about your MacBook. What ports does it have? ExpressPort? FW800?
Best,
Andy -
[Aaron Vaughn] “We have been working with ZFS for over 3 years now, and have seen the advantages of ZFS over traditional storage. We’ve built and sold many solutions to video editors and have seen over 40 streams at once coming from a ZFS array, and have saturated a 10gbe network with 8 editors.”
Curious: are you sharing ZFS via NFS or SMB? Or something else?
Best,
Andy -
[Frank Gothmann] “The main problem I have at this stage is that there is little information out there as to compatibility, chaining order and how devices actually influence each other and eat bandwith. So, yeah, I’d also be a bit cautious.”
Yep, physics is still physics and bandwidth is still limited. Thunderbolt is not going to be doing a lot of the things people want it to be doing until it has a wider pipe.
[Frank Gothmann] “On another note: why not get a beefy small Raid box that connects via SAS? It’s cheaper then a TB raid and you have guaranteed bandwith, regardless of other cards and peripherals, that goes way beyond what a TB raid would provide.”
For SAS, you need an HBA, and that means a PCIe slot. I think the thing that is getting conflated in the whole Thunderbolt discussion is the idea that Thunderbolt is somehow a replacement for PCIe. It clearly isn’t, but all the hype has combined with the Mac Pro’s cobwebs to lead everyone to seem to see it as Thunderbolt vs PCIe instead of Thunderbolt superseding FW800 and ExpressCard. We never had PCIe slots on the Macs that have Thunderbolt, so it doesn’t make sense to me to make the comparison to PCIe.
Like I said before, if we get new Mac Pros that have Thunderbolt ports in lieu of 8x and 16x PCIe slots, that’s another story. It would be a damn shame too, since the E5 Xeons will have PCIe 3.0 support. That’s double the bandwidth of PCIe 2.0. A couple PCIe 3.0 16x slots would be as good as four of today’s 16x slots!
Best,
Andy -
[Bob Zelin] “It is clear to me that current generation thunderbolt is specifically designed for students, parents, and grandma, who can go out to the Apple store in the shopping mall, buy a new Thunderbolt monitor and cheap drive array, plug it in, and “Voila”, everything just works without configuration. That’s the point of what Apple has currently done. Apple is not concerned with currently addressing our hi end professional needs with Thunderbolt. The point is to be easy to plug in and use – not get world class performance. “
Hold on a sec. Grandma? What grandma, parent, or student is buying $1,500 – $2,000 storage arrays??
We went from having nothing better than FW800 or ExpressCard on laptops to having something with a shade more bandwidth than a PCIe 2.0 4 lane slot, and this is somehow a consumery joke of a bus? Yes, Thunderbolt is slower compared to the I/O on a Mac Pro or other full-size workstation or server, but it blows out of the water all previously available busses on portables and iMacs, including ExpressCard.
Also, let’s stop laying this all at Apple’s feet. Thunderbolt is Intel’s tech. Apple undoubtedly played a significant role in it’s development and they are clearly the early adopter in the market, but claiming “Apple is not concerned with currently addressing our hi end professional needs” based on Thunderbolt being presently slower than 8 lane and 16 lane PCIe slots is really stretching the “Apple hates pros” meme.
With Thunderbolt, we can now have 4Gb Fibre Channel on a Mac mini. We can have the functional equivalent of a Kona LHi on a MacBook Air. I get that your whole world revolves around 10Gb Ethernet, but that doesn’t make Thunderbolt a useless fad. On the contrary, even at Gen1 it is a huge step forward in I/O for anything other than towers and rack-mount servers.
If we never get a new Mac Pro when Intel finally ships the E5 Xeons, or if that next Mac Pro has been gutted and left with nothing but Thunderbolt ports, then we can talk about Apple’s disdain for the pros.
Best,
Andy -
Also, if he spent any time reading past posts he could have answered his question 100 times over.
Best,
Andy -
Cool! Didn’t know you had one.
Best,
Andy -
ZFS can be more fault-tolerant than hardware RAID, depending on how it is configured. It comes at the expense of system resources though, since the more sophisticated the ZFS setup the more RAM and CPU overhead it incurs. You wouldn’t want to use it locally attached for video work, but if served out as a NAS (it has built-in provisions for NFS, SMB, and can even do iSCSI), it could be a very fast and secure storage (again, depending on how it is set up).
Best,
Andy -
What are you recommending for an OS X iSCSI initiator? ATTO or SNS? Are there any other options?
Best,
Andy -
At my last facility we bought maintenance for OS X and FCP, so we were essentially pre-buying the updates. In recent years, that program has been obsoleted by the App Store sales model and the much lower prices of major versions (at least with Apple stuff). For Adobe it used to be less compelling to buy every upgrade, but now Adobe is changing its pricing model as well to encourage customers to stay current (subscription pricing and higher upgrade prices for versions older than the most recent major rev).
Best,
Andy