Red Rocket + Sonnetech Thunderbolt Adapter EASY?

[Peter Cote]

I am about to buy a couple Red Rockets and Sonnetech Thunderbolt Adapters. I don't have a lot of experience with either of these. Are they fairly easy to use? I will be using them on current generation iMacs with CS6.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

You will need to buy the larger "Pro" model of the Sonnet Thunderbolt to PCIe expander to fit the Rocket card.

What is it you're trying to accomplish specifically? You'd be amazed at what you can accomplish with a properly configured iMac or Macbook Pro system, CS6 and NO ROCKET. I would make sure that iMac has 32GB of RAM in it, an SSD for primary storage and a good external RAID (Thunderbolt) first. Only bottleneck you should encounter then is for high-quality transcodes or final renders. If you're doing mostly transcodes, this probably isn't the most effective solution.

[Peter Cote]

Thanks Jeff, I currently have an iMac with an SSD, 32 GB RAM, and working from Thunderbolt drives. The problem is that I have to step down to lowest playback resolution in Premiere. It doesn't look that great and would love to be able to hit half resolution playback.

I was planning on purchasing the Echo Express Pro Thunderbolt Expansion Chassis. I believe this is the one that fits the Red Rocket, correct?

[Jason Diamond]

Jeff, would you say adding a Rocket and a good NVidia gpu into that box that it would boost that iMac significantly? Esp in CS6?
Using the second tBolt port for data and other peripherals?

[C.H.Haskell]

Is it safe to say a rocket will accelerate my CS6 experience?

C

[Shiblon Wixom]

The Mac OS intentionally doesn't support external pci-e graphics cards (Nvidia card won't help), a red rocket card would work well since it only uses x4 lanes for playback and x4 lanes for transcodes and TB is comprised of x4 lane multiples (two x4 or four x4) depending on the TB controller.

[Paul Ellington]

You will need to buy the larger "Pro" model of the Sonnet Thunderbolt to PCIe expander to fit the Rocket card.

What is it you're trying to accomplish specifically? You'd be amazed at what you can accomplish with a properly configured iMac or Macbook Pro system, CS6 and NO ROCKET. I would make sure that iMac has 32GB of RAM in it, an SSD for primary storage and a good external RAID (Thunderbolt) first. Only bottleneck you should encounter then is for high-quality transcodes or final renders. If you're doing mostly transcodes, this probably isn't the most effective solution.

Dear Mr. Kilgroe,

I own a 12TB Promise. Right now its storing lots of old projects. I was considering getting a cheaper Raid and erasing whats on the promise once it's backed up. This is the 3rd backup in the chain. So after the Promise is emptied there would still be 2 copies of everything.

Thanks for any advice.

- Ellington

[Chris McKechnie]

Get a MAXX Digital Edit Vault...like $300 for 2TB. Connect that via esata to the Lacie Esata/TB Hub ($200). Cheap and fast backup storage solution. :-)

[Peter Cote]

Anyone have a response as to whether or not a Sonnetech PCI-e thunderbolt adapter plus + Red Rocket is user friendly?

[Paul Ellington]

Get a MAXX Digital Edit Vault...like $300 for 2TB. Connect that via esata to the Lacie Esata/TB Hub ($200). Cheap and fast backup storage solution. :-)

My 12 tb is full