Sonnet xMac mini Server up and running with RED Rocket!

[Ryland Jones]

Happy to say my Sonnet xMac mini Server Arrived yesterday!








RED Rocket up and running fine. RED's new driver is thunderbolt aware. Also added Sonnet's Express Bus Extender PCIe 2.0 for my QIO card reader. Much more stable than using the express card adapter or the Echo TB adapter.

Greg from Sonnet sent me this:

"You may already be aware, but at long last two important milestones.

1) We passed Intel/ Apple Thunderbolt certification testing, have begun shipping the xMac mini Server yesterday and will begin shipping the Echo Express and Echo Express Pro Thunderbolt Expansion Chassis tomorrow.

These are links to the latest product info

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/ec...sschassis.html
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/xmacminiserver.html



2) RED released (posted) a version of their RED Rocket driver 1.4.27 which is Thunderbolt "aware". This means that the RED Rocket, in our Echo Express Pro Thunderbolt chassis will be recognized over Thunderbolt and run. The caveat is that the driver does not yet support hot unplug / plug and sleep modes and users need to know that they have to only connect and disconnect the chassis (with the Rocket) when the computer is shut down. Because of this we can not post it as "Thunderbolt "compatible" on our PCIe card compatibility chart (http://www.sonnettech.com/support/ch...olt/index.html) and RED can not promote it as Thunderbolt compatible.
I don't believe anybody in the RED user community knows this yet.


Best regards,

Greg"

Happy to have the case up and running with no issues. :-) Export test from Redcine X did a 4K file 1:17 min long in just under 1:00 min. Fast enough for me.

Now if only Apple would have given us a real upgrade on the Mac Pros...

[Brian Iannone]

Looks great! Amazing now that a ROCKET can be used on a Mac Mini, isn't it? =)

[Ryland Jones]

Looks great! Amazing now that a ROCKET can be used on a Mac Mini, isn't it? =)

Very much so!

[Julian Banos]

Have you done any benchmarks? How does it compare to a MP?

[Ryland Jones]

Have you done any benchmarks? How does it compare to a MP?

It will never really compare to being in a x16 PCI slot, but for the portability, it's amazing.

I haven't done a side by side test. (It's been working a lot since I got it.) But I'm getting a 1:1 ratio. Real time transcodes on my Quad-Core MacMini. Took exactly 1 min to transcode and 1 min 4K .r3d file -> 1080 ProRes 422 HQ. The r3d was also located on the main computer drive. I'll be doing some heavy transcoding with it over the next few weeks and will try to get a chart up.