CUBIX Desktop 4 or Cyclone 2707 Expander for Davinci Resolve 5K r3d

[Jarek Zabczynski]

Nice. How many drives can you get in the standard enclosure?

[Koray Birand]

Where did you get the fan from... I am looking for a quite fas as well. Because those deaf engineers are gonna make me deaf as well.

Hey Dusty,

Did the Cyclone guys ever work out the issue with the 6Gbps SAS cards? I had not followed up as I ended up with the Cubix. ...Cubix runs great, BTW, had to swap out the annoyingly stupidly loud fan. I swear that all "desktop" enclosure engineers are deaf. Especially the ones working for Cubix and HP....

I have the 4-slot Cubix, 4 single-width slots. I have a RED Rocket, Quadro 4000 and CalDigit 6GU3 (USB3 and eSATA 6gbps) in the expander.

In the Mac Pro tower I have this:

slot1: Quadro 4000
slot2: Cubix x16 interface
slot3: BlackMagic Decklink HD Extreme 3D+
Slot4: ATTO H680 SAS/SATA HBA


Never tried it, but you probably can't use the Mac Pro RAID card from the expander. In fact, I believe that card must be installed in slot-4, if you are indeed talking about the one from Apple, which ties onto the internal SAS/SATA backplane. FWIW, this card should not be used if you can help it... It's better than the previous revision, assuming you have the version compatible with the '09/'10 Mac Pro systems. However, it's still pretty limited and often problematic. If you need a bootable RAID on the Mac, take a look at the ARECA RAID cards. You can run one from the expander, but I recommend keeping your RAID hosts inside the tower -- or at least you really should if you want to boot from them.

[Asif Limbada]

Funny you should say that .... in one of our Cyclone 2707 expansion boxes we have 3 x GTX 285s and 12TB of RAID .... don't necessarily recommend using the Cyclone RAID for heavy online real time processing with multiple nodes but as near-line back-up it works like a dream. Just put the RAID controller in the 5th slot and put a bunch of 2TB or 3TB drives inside the enclosure.

Cyclone box now weighs a ton but very convenient ... let me know if you try it as your only source of real-time storage.

Cheers,
Neil

Nice....Neil, what RAID card was that? I will need a backup system (its never enough).
I like the fact that with the Cyclone you can actually segregate your different tasks.

I will be even connecting a eSATA3 Card in for connecting Ext HDD with eSata (until Apple comes out with the new MAC PRO that is). When dumping data, into the scratch, will not use the RED Rocket or Quadro from the Cyclone.

[Neil W. Smith]

Nice....Neil, what RAID card was that? I will need a backup system (its never enough).
I like the fact that with the Cyclone you can actually segregate your different tasks.

I will be even connecting a eSATA3 Card in for connecting Ext HDD with eSata (until Apple comes out with the new MAC PRO that is). When dumping data, into the scratch, will not use the RED Rocket or Quadro from the Cyclone.

Asif,

We use a simple eSata card from Sonnet Technologies ... attached 4 x 3TB drives with RAID 0 - works like a dream ... I'm sure that if you wanted RAID 5 protection you could install a more expensive card.

Agree with you on how the need for storage just keeps growing ... we use a mixture of a centralized fiber channel SAN with lots of DAS - but we always need more .... the Cyclone box with the large power supply has been a very cool way to attach extra drives.

Let me know what you end up using and how you get on.

Cheers,
Neil

[Dustin Cross]

I have an Atto R30F 4 internal SAS in my Cyclone. Connected to 10 Esata drives via three fan cables and one SAS LTO4 via a SAS cable.

I also have an H680 to connect to external eSata drives in the Cyclone. And I have put my old RocketRaid card in there to connect to a Raid that uses that.

Having the raid built into the Cyclone is great and one of the reasons I highly recommend the Cyclone.

My Rocket works great in the Cyclone and I have one GTX285 in there. I usually have my Blackmagic card in there too. I tend to keep my CompressHD and Sonnet QIO cards in the tower, but I move things around as required for the job.



Dusty

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Where did you get the fan from... I am looking for a quite fas as well. Because those deaf engineers are gonna make me deaf as well.

I tried a couple different fans from Thermaltake, and Gelid. I don't recall which one I settled with, some I ordered, some I already had amongst my other parts.

I have actually sold my Cubix Xpander and a couple of the Quadro 4000 cards. I'm moving my Resolve work over to PC... Still operating on the Mac at the moment, but I have to play switcheroo with my second quadro card and my ATTO card, depending on what I'm doing. I only use the ATTO card on this system (an older H380 card) for connecting an LTO unit for backups and occasionally an eSATA drive. System has two Quadro 4000's, a RED Rocket and the DeckLink HD Extreme 3D+ card in it at the moment. I'm due to make a back-up, so I'll pull the second quadro to put in the ATTO this weekend and make some tapes.

Only reason to stay on Mac for Resolve at this point is if you primarily need to deliver ProRes... Well, that and the Windows version isn't out of "beta" just yet. I don't often deliver ProRes these days, so that's that..

[Dustin Cross]

I use Silenx brand fans. Do a web search and you will find lots of places that sell them. They have the least amount of noise per volume of air they push.


Dusty

[Jarek Zabczynski]

Can you sleep a Mac when using one of these expansion systems or do you need to power off? Reading up on the Cyclone I see it turns on and off via signals from the host machine. Makes sense for power on/off. What happens when you sleep the tower?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Cubix / Cyclone should sleep with the host system.... Although, you can't sleep a system that has a RED Rocket installed (or a few other cards out there on the market), so I never tested/tried.

[Jarek Zabczynski]

Cubix / Cyclone should sleep with the host system.... Although, you can't sleep a system that has a RED Rocket installed (or a few other cards out there on the market), so I never tested/tried.

Good to know. I leave my tower on 27/7 and just sleep it at night. Why does a Rocket affect sleep? I'd also be curious how a raid set within a Cyclone would respond to sleep. Suppose you might need to unmount any volumes in the Cyclone first.