Magma ExpressBox 3T

[Michael Lindsay]

Make sure your laptop is on mains power AND has at least 50% battery...

Testing Promise 6 bay TB with Mangma with RR...

M

[Jason Osterday]

Any updates? Curious how these would work in tandem:

Ultra studio (for resolve)
SAS Storage H680
Rocket
Promise RAID

At what point do you begin to saturate the TB lanes?

[Uli Plank]

I have no problems using BM Intensity and RR in an Echo Express Pro and a Pegasus RAID on the other port of a Retina MBP.

[Steve Sherrick]

I have no problems using BM Intensity and RR in an Echo Express Pro and a Pegasus RAID on the other port of a Retina MBP.

Uli, which Retina are you using? The maxed out version?

[Uli Plank]

2.6 Ghz with 512 GB SSD and 16 GB RAM. I consider RAM more effective than clock cycles. With the Thunderbolt box and the RAID it comes quite close to a MacPro…

One example: 1 Minute of native QuadHD 25 fps transcoded to 1080 in max quality in 19 minutes by CPU, 50 seconds by RR.

[Eric Santiago]

I have no problems using BM Intensity and RR in an Echo Express Pro and a Pegasus RAID on the other port of a Retina MBP.

Uli what speeds are you getting with the RR? As in 4x or ? playback res?

Im thinking of getting the new Sonnet Temp SSD Pro to avoid external drives.

Want to make this small as possible.

[Shiblon Wixom]

The Red Rocket card and several other manufacturer's PCI-e cards are thunderbolt "aware", and will work over thunderbolt as long as the device was plugged in during startup as with normal PCI-e extension setups, but because the cards will never be hot swappable they cannot be classified as thunderbolt "compatible", and will only ever be listed as thunderbolt "aware".

[Eric Santiago]

Does anyone know if GPUs work with the Magma?
Sadly the Sonnet dont.

[Neil W. Smith]

Does anyone know if GPUs work with the Magma?
Sadly the Sonnet dont.

GPUs not working with the Sonnet expansion boxes is not specific to Sonnet or any Tbolt manufacturer for that matter .... most modern PCIe GPUs are x 16 lane PCIe cards with very high speed I/O to the MB and CPU .... Tbolt by definition is only x 8 lanes maximum ... so though you can get 10GBs I/O speed on the Tbolt bus you don't have enough PCIe lanes to carry the tremendous amount of data that modern GPUs typically process.

Believe me, I've tried every which way to get our Sonnet Tbolt expansion boxes to work with nVIDIA GPUS ... but no luck (if anyone cracks the code - please let us all know) ... Tbolt will not even see a x 16 lane GPU.

Also, the bandwidth requirements for CUDA based image processing are incredibly high ... in one of our Mac Resolve Systems I'm using three EVGA GTX 690 cards (i.e., six GTX 680 cards) to push Resolve to the limits .... only the PCIe bus can handle that data throughput.

The Sonnet Tbolt expansion boxes are terrific for adding RedRocket, Fiber Channel, 10GigE and eSATA cards but alas not GPUs .... still a Retina Display MBP with a couple of Sonnet Tbolt boxes attached is a beast of a machine .... now if there was just someway to snuck a couple of EVGA 690s in there somehow, we'd be happy as Larry.

Will be interesting to see how Apple incorporates Tbolt and USB 3 as well as PCIe 3 into next year's Mac Pro Tower upgrade.

Cheers,
Neil

[Eric Santiago]

Thanks Neil.
Yes that would be perfect if GPUs did work on the Sonnets :)
I take it that the Magma isnt 16x either.