Magma ExpressBox 3T

[Nick Shaw]

I'd love to hear from anyone who certifiably getting x8 results, aggregated from the two ports.

I don't have a Retina MBP, but I can tell you that the Rocket shows up as 8x in the Magma on my 17" (single TB port) 2011 MBP and the performance I get is significantly better than I get in my Mac Pro 2,1 in which I need to run the Rocket in 4x mode.

[Sergio Perez]

if you need it sooner than later get the sonnet. magma is taking their grand old time making sure their product works a certain way and qualifying a lot of drivers for a lot of cards. i pre ordered mine way last year as soon as you were able to after they announced 2011 NAB, so it got me in the list for a pre production model. absolutely no clue when they'll start rolling out in numbers. could be a manufacturing issue too who knows.

Thanks Tom. My deadline is actually end of September, so still some time to decide. Of course if I had this sooner I would get familiar with the workflow and would probably gain the advantage of mobility which would open some other doors, but the magma has 3 slots, and i see myself putting a SAS card, a Rocket and would like to have an extra slot for an eventual GPU upgrade if this becomes possible...

[Kwan Khan]

GPU upgrade if this becomes possible...

+++100 (lol)

[Steve Johnson]

I don't have a Retina MBP, but I can tell you that the Rocket shows up as 8x in the Magma on my 17" (single TB port) 2011 MBP and the performance I get is significantly better than I get in my Mac Pro 2,1 in which I need to run the Rocket in 4x mode.

Well I was doing a little research into this and popped into one of the Apple Stores in Glasgow and spoke with a few people who I've know for a few years and always give me great advise. They double checked and the MBP Retina's two TB ports are separate. So there is the 10GBps throughout bi directional on both.

So that might have sorted that problem. Now just need to decide if I'll get the Sonnet or Magma chassis.

:))

[Benjamin Hopkins]

On the Retina MBP when you run System Info it shows each Thunderbolt port separately and each has a link status (I assume this means capability) of 7 and each has a separate link controller firmware version, thought both are 0.11.4.

Yes, that's right, forgot to mention that. When I compared the new retina display model with the non-retina display model which only has one ports I got the following info in System Profiler:



And to compare, here's what the retina display MBP says:



So there is a difference. I just can't get anyone at Apple to confirm that 2 ports means much more than simply identifying what's plugged into which port. They still go back and forth on whether they think the ports have double the bandwidth and chaining capacity of single ported MBPs. But now that I know that the chipset is Intel DSL3510L, which is a 4 channel chip, I'm much more hopeful of double bandwidth performance in the real-world.

[Steve Johnson]

Yes, that's right, forgot to mention that. When I compared the new retina display model with the non-retina display model which only has one ports I got the following info in System Profiler:

And to compare, here's what the retina display MBP says:

So there is a difference. I just can't get anyone at Apple to confirm that 2 ports means much more than simply identifying what's plugged into which port. They still go back and forth on whether they think the ports have double the bandwidth and chaining capacity of single ported MBPs. But now that I know that the chipset is Intel DSL3510L, which is a 4 channel chip, I'm much more hopeful of double bandwidth performance in the real-world.

Ben,

This is what I found through my conversations at the Apple Store in Glasgow today. According to my contacts, they do offer the double bandwidth, so you could get 14 TB products connected to one MBP Retina. Although I know of no-one who currently has 14 TB products to test this theory, if indeed true. These guys at Apple who I know have always given me sound and correct advise in the past and I see no reason to doubt them. But an official confirmation would help.

:))

[Tom.Wong]

a friend called up magma. they say production units should be shipping within the next 2 weeks. let's hope that's true!

[Nick Eason]

Steve, Ben, check the Tom's Hardware link Ben posted again. The DSL3510L is connected to the host system via a 4 lane PCIe 2.0 link. That means t-bolt B/W will be limited to 16gbps for both ports in the aggregate.

[Bob Gundu]

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/E...id=TfiGEyvGn8Y

sooner than that.

a friend called up magma. they say production units should be shipping within the next 2 weeks. let's hope that's true!

[Benjamin Hopkins]

Magma ExpressBox 3T Shipping as of this Friday, July 20th, according to an email I just got from them. But their website is down on that page right now.