HELP - MAKE A THUNDERBOLT ONLY RAID CONNECT TO A NON TB MAC PRO?

[Anson Fogel]

Oh great Reduserverse. I have a large project (9+TB) on a Pegasus R6 Thunderbolt RAID without any other interface. I need to connect it to my non Thunderbolt MacPro, ca 2011.

Has anyone connected a thunderbolt drive to a non thunderbolt machine via an adapter?

I bought the Sonnet Tunderbolt ExpressCard adapter, but it is apparently intended to enable a hot machine's thunderbolt port run/adapter using Sonnet expresscards to connect via FW, eSata, etc - not the other way around. My CalDigit Esata expresscard will not power up in the sonnet adapter, nor connect the drive. I ordered the Sonnet brand expresscard, but am afraid this won't work.

I searched all over for Thunderbolt adapters...with little luck.

The drive works fine on a new 15" MBP via Thunderbolt, so I could offload all 9TB of data onto other drive(s) and then use those on my MacPro but MAN it would be nice to avoid that...and 9TB is a LOT of data, my raids are only 6TB ea...

Ideas? Anyone? On a deadline...

[Frederick Giles]

Whao that's sounds screwed, you could try sharing your 15" MBP over firewire or gigbit ethernet to your mac pro.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Short answer... you're screwed. :-(

If you have a Thunderbolt-equipped Mac handy, you could attach it to that Mac and start it up in Target Disc mode, it *might* allow sharing of the TB drive... maybe, but I doubt it.

You may just have to go the offline route or offload the data to other drives, access it over Gig-E... I know, it sucks, but currently there are no PCIe to Thunderbolt adapters out there or other means to connect a TB device to a non-TB equipped system.

[Dustin Cross]

Anson,

This is one of the reasons I keep telling people NOT to use Thunderbolt drives. Connect it to your laptop and start transfering to non-Thunderbolt drive. There is no other solution now.


Dusty

[Jeff J Daniels]

This is the main reason I don't have any Thunderbolt drives yet. It's a shame it wasn't adopted faster/further.

Fastest transfer solution would probably be to an esata RAID like a MaxxDigital, or G-Tech RAID box via an Express34 => esata adapter. (someone correct me if I'm wrong)

Good luck Anson.

[Nick Shaw]

This is one of the reasons I keep telling people NOT to use Thunderbolt drives.

Agreed. That's why I think currently Thunderbolt drives are not useful as anything except a personal work drive, and so why I don't own any. I was hoping for multi interface Thundderbolt drives at NAB, but seems no joy there.

I have a LaCie eSATA hub which connects to my Macbook Pro by Thunderbolt, so letting me use eSata drives and the REDstation at top speed. Pretty happy with that so far.

I also have a pre-production Magma ExpressBox 3T on its way to me for testing other Thunderbolt based options

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Thunderbolt is turning out to be a great interface and there was tons of new Thunderbolt stuff at NAB. The big problem with it right now is since it's essentially an extension of PCIe, it's not likely that Thunderbolt devices will have other interfaces on them. So external drives are not likely to have both Thunderbolt and USB3 ports. It's certainly possible, but would effectively require two separate interface busses inside the device and some way for it to be switched, possibly a manual switch. Doesn't help that Thunderbolt was only launched in February of 2011 and only three companies were given advance notice of the launch -- and only by about 3 weeks. So it looks like products are taking forever to come to market. On the contrary, they're actually coming quite fast. Initially there were to be no PCIe to Thunderbolt adapters -- Intel said they would not approve them. It seems they have lifted that restriction and we're seeing other interface boards with Thunderbolt, just not the simple PCIe expansion card... yet. Perhaps in the not too distant future, but right now I think there isn't a whole lot of market for it.

My Pegasus R6 is a great external RAID unit and it's great on my iMac with the ability to also connect it to a Macbook Pro or Macbook Air. But I can't do a lot of stuff with it just yet since it won't connect to anything else at the moment. PCs are getting Thunderbolt here in the coming months. Several Ivy Bridge PC notebooks will have it -- I've already seen a few of them myself.

If this is a RAID supplied by a client, I'd simply hand it back to them and tell them to try again otherwise bill them for the extra pain and suffering to provide a solution. It's as impractical as clients supplying 2TB HDDs with USB2.0 or FW400 interfaces. In those situations, if it's a RAID device, I won't accept it and tell them they have to give me something I can work with at reasonable speeds. If it's a single drive device, I give them the option of giving me something faster or me pulling the drive apart to connect it via SATA. I'm continuously amazed at how many clients just have me pull the drive apart because it's apparently too much hassle for them to copy 1TB of files to something reasonably fast.

Of course, I did it once and the client didn't really understand what I meant by pulling it apart. And it was some Seagate enclosure that was designed to not come apart at all, so I had to literally crack it open. Client freaked when I returned the HDD and the enclosure that looked like I had opened it with a crowbar -- which I essentially did. They agreed to not bill me for "destroying" the drive since I agreed to not bill them for the time it took to do it. :)

Anyway, moving forward, it's pretty clear that USB3 and Thunderbolt are the two dominant interfaces for the next few years. Everything else is just a legacy port at this point. At least until 12Gbps eSATA comes out in late 2014, we will probably see that push onto some desktop PCs, maybe. 12Gbps SAS should ship by the middle of next year. But it's really going to depend on SSDs coming way down in price and ramping up capacity.

[Dustin Cross]

Jeff,

Why are you saying 6G eSata & 6G SAS are legacy? There is no better option for connecting drives right now and into the near future. Plus as you mention 12G is right around the corner. Thunderbolt is going to be great, but I it won't replace eSata/SAS. USB3 has been around since early 2009 and hasn't done anything. I see USB3 as a non-starter and it seems Apple will never support it. Here are the external interconnects I see:

Thunderbolt - Going to be great, just need more devices.
PCIe - it is great and much faster than Thunderbolt, but not as simple
SAS/eSata - it is great. Best way to connect small external drives now and in the near future
USB3 - Thunderbolt is better, just like Firewire is better than USB2.

There are others, but these are the ones that most effect us shuttling between set and post.



Dusty

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Yeah, I didn't meant to come across that way. SAS/SATA are still major players, I was just thinking in the form of handy external HDDs.

Although, with USB3 incorporated in the latest Intel chipsets, it seems that eSATA is being cast aside. Both the new HP and Dell Xeon systems have done away with eSATA ports. The ports are still there, as internal headers, so do with them what you will if you want to pipe them to the rear, great. :)

I agree USB3 is somewhat of a non-starter. I'm not so much a fan of it in that it has huge overhead and is terribly inefficient. There's more than one reason Intel took so long to adopt it as a standard, which is why Apple also never rolled it into their systems. That should change going forward now that it's a part of all the new Intel chipsets. And that aside, USB3 is still the only interface out there that lets someone plug in a small HDD or SSD that can run faster than 3Gbps SATA and do it without an additional power supply. When dealing with the general public / consumers / clients. USB3 is the most simple... Simple is a big deal.

Thunderbolt will probably never supply bus power adequate to power things like USB3 does. Currently the power is there, but it gets soaked up with all the other electronics overhead. The newer interfaces Intel is working on will eliminate a lot of the power requirement, but they are also trying to offer optical cable solutions as well and in doing that they have to limit the power requirement or at least limit it by distance.