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PCI-E Expansion Chassis Advice?

Nook Kim

Nook Kim

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I had never thought of adding more PCI-E slots to my Mac Pro until I came across Brook's article about how bad the new Mac Pro line up's are for professionals. In that article Brook talks about how he always has to spend $$$ to buy a PCI-E tower, etc. So I was intrigued by his article and did a bit of search. The first product line I came across was from MAGMA:

http://www.magma.com

And I think I like this product from them:

http://www.magma.com/expressbox4.asp

But since this is all very new to me, I wanted to get your opinions first.
What do I need to look out for when I choose a chassis like this?
Can I put any PCI-E cards (ie. Graphics, Video I/O, RAID host card, RR, etc) into these chassis?
Which models do you recommend out of your experiences?

By the way, I'd like to thank Brook for the very logical article and for sharing his Mac Pro config.
 
Here is a thread were several solutions were mentioned.
http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=45481

I have been considering getting the new Cyclone 600-2707 Gen2 x16 expander:
http://www.cyclone.com/products/expansion_systems/600-2707.php

If I get one I think I will put it is a case like this, so I can put 10 harddrives in the same case, plus an LTO and a Bluray burner.
http://www.rackmountmart.com/rm4u/rm4031.htm

This set-up gives a lot of expansion.

I have been talking to the company and they said they have fixed teh latency issues mentioned in the other thread and this is all gen2 PCIe, but they should say good things about their product.


Dusty
 
Nook,

The ExpressBox4 is a cool solution, but you need to consider the cards you will need to put in the expander.

Think about all the cards you need and their speed and then look for the proper sized solution.

For instance, I am looking or a solution so I can have the following cards in my Mac Pro:

x16 GTX 285
x8 Atto Raid controller
x8 Red Rocket
x8 10GBE
x4 Kona 3
x4 Sonnet Tempo eSATA
x1 Sonnet Tempo Firewire 800

Maybe USB3 x4

Plus if I want to run Davinci Resolve, I need a second video card x16

Plus I need a card to connect to the PCIe Expander x8 or x16.

So for my perfect system, I need:

3x - x16 slots
3x - x8 slots
3x - x4 slots
1x - x1 slot

Mac Pro gives me:
2x - x16
2x - x4

Cyclone gives me:
3x - x16
2x - x8

So I am already one card short, so I give up either USB3 or Firewire 800. Not too big of a deal. USB3 is not very common yet and hopefully, 64GB cards will be out and I won't have to deal with Red Drives and firewire 800 anymore. Or if Red makes a Red Station module to connect to Red Drives via eSATA that would be the best solution.

This gives me every card I need in a system, my question then becomes, how will it perform?


Dusty
 
You are limited to 40 lanes of performance. The PCIe expander provides more than 40 lanes to use and a switch to control them. But everything back to your Mac is switched through 16 lanes (if you are using the Cyclone I mention above).

The question is how does having multiple cards sharing that 16 lanes slot effect performance? Multiple x8 cards should not slow down much at all.


Dusty
 
Right. 40 lanes total of performance.

Even with the switch, running Resolve on a Mac Pro with a RAID card and a Red Rocket would be impossible unless we could use a single (faster) GPU or do without the Blackmagic card.
 
Gen1 x4 Raid card
Gen1 x8 Rocket
Gen1 x4 Blackmagic

All of that should easily run full speed through a Gen2 X16 slot on a PCIe expander. With room to add a second GPU.

In my limited testing I have not found a video card that is faster in x16 slot than it is in x8 slot. And all the SLI testing I have looked at seems to confirm. I compared render times in Color and Motion.

You could get a newer raid card, but the old ones are capable of 500MB/s.


Dusty
 
Some great insights! The biggest factor for me is that the system can't slow down a bit. Okay maybe a tiny bit of performance slow-down might be better than having only four slots, but as any of you do, I'd like to find the perfect solution if exists. So please chime in if you know of a near perfect solution.

For my needs, I will have a system like this:

ATI 4870
AJA KONA 3
ATTO H680 for HP 3000 LTO5
(2) ATTO RAID controler for SAS RAID
RED ROCKET
x4 SONNET e-SATA
 
Hmm.... I hope you are right. I'm seriously thinking of Resolve on Mac especially if they get Red Rocket support.

Had lots of problems with Color on a recent feature so I ended up selling my FCS.
 
It wasn't just the Color looping bug. sometimes when I sent the sequence back to FCP the clips would be all out of order, some clips would be duplicated and end up in random places all over the timeline. Basically a complete mess. Then there was the issue of Boris titles not sticking to their alignment.
 
That sucks. Glad I haven't had that problem. But the problems with bad timecode hidden in Red wappers was enough of a nightmare. Way worse than the simple looping bug stuff and very random.

Other than that, I have been very happy with Color.


Dusty
 
The best expander solution I have seen is the JMR BlueStor. First rate engineering, 16 drive bays, rock solid. It's more expensive than the options Dusty (and others) have mentioned but you do get what you pay for.

Disclosure, I do some work with JMR. That said, one of the reasons I agreed to work with them is that they rock hard. For the slice of the market I covet, nothing beats bulletproof.

Cheers - #19
 
I admit, the JMR Bluestor is awesome, but the price....... If it had Gen2 x16 card to multiple Gen2 x16 slots more like the Cyclone 2707 and had a built in Raid 6 controller, I could maybe understand the price.

If you have a big budget and aren't tech enough to roll-your-own, then the Bluestor is the best solution.


Dusty
 
Have you tested different cards on the Netstor? Is the PCI-e expansion limited to only storage cards or can you also do a video card? Say Red Rocket or Blackmagic/AJA? From what I read it seemed limited to storage cards, or "standard cards" Any testing? Good price though and good to hear it's at least got a good 9 months run.
 
For real peejeedee, I would like to hear some personal experience with this rig please.
 
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