Hello Thunderbolters

For those of you who have been eager to get Thunderbolt into your workflow like us, you have been trying to get your hands on every piece of kit going. Well it just so happens that a few days ago we got our hands on our very own, spanking brand new Sonnet Echo Express Thunderbolt PCIe Expansion Chassis. Anyone who has been following DIT Station at all knows that Sonnet have very kindly been working with us to build our new DIT Station Rogue on sale now (shameless plug) and to implement their Thunderbolt tech into what we're doing.
As awesome as the DIT Station Rogue is, www.ditstation.com (2nd shameless plug), I thought I'd post here just to let you know a little about what we've found running the RED Rocket in the Thunderbolt Chassis. We have our hands on the longer two slot chassis that shipped this week so it can hold two, count it TWO, RED Rocket cards. This is realistically about all Thunderbolt can handle and it's doing it very well.
The RED Rocket is basically the first card we put in it but as we were installing noticed that the latest build doesn't mention that it's Thunderbolt compatible, not to mention it also doesn't come up on Sonnet's compatibility chart either. Links Below:

RED Downloads - https://www.red.com/downloads
Build 1.4.27
Sonnet - http://www.sonnettech.com/support/ch...olt/index.html

This is obviously a little strange for two reasons, we have been testing the RED Rocket through various builds of the Echo Express since they announced it at IBC last year, and we have it right here in front of us working like a champ, AWESOME. So I got on the old phone (my iphone) called my mates at RED and Sonnet and found out why it doesn't list the RED Rocket as a compatible card.

INTERESTING PART
It turns out to be able to officially list any kind of PCIe card as "Thunderbolt Compatible" it has to be hot plug-able. Who knew? Well me now. Basically the Rocket driver is Thunderbolt "aware" and as I mentioned before working great but the only thing is you can't hot swap it while the RED Rocket is in there and the computer is running, other cards on the Sonnet list are fine.
So those of you out there looking for a Thunderbolt RED Rocket, here it is http://www.sonnettech.com/product/th...olt/index.html

THE FIRST IMPRESSIONS REVIEW
I have to say now we have the final product I'm really impressed. It's tough aluminium / aluminum, when I opened it up it has plenty of fans and a nice internal power supply so there's no wall wart, you just plug an IEC direct into the back, sweet. It's got two Thunderbolt ports so you can daisy chain and fits even the longer PCIe cards as well. We ran the RED Rocket in there for ages and it kept it really nice and chilled out. Kind of wish it was Thunderbolt blue for some reason but that's just me.

Keep your eye's peeled and we'll post some official specs ASAP.

Martin
DIT Station