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Making everything fit in a Mac Pro 4,1 PCI-e

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Nathan Pena

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Hello,

Getting my red rocket very soon and wondering how everythings going to fit. Have a 8 core Mac Pro 4,1, currently with:

Nvidia GT120 video card
Blackmagic Decklink extreme
Newertech esata card

New arrivals will be:
ATTO or Highpoint Raid controller
Red Rocket

It seems like this is pretty standard stuff for most guys here, but wondering how people have gotten it all to fit? Looks like I'm 1 PCIe slot short.

Can you use a SAS to 4-eSATA cable from Raid card to connect external drives or redstation modules, thus, being able to ditch the eSATA card.

or, using a PCI-e expansion case? And if so, any recommendations?

or, is there some simple solution I've overlooked?

Anyways, thanks for reading, just looking for solutions to get this all to work.

Best,

Nathan
 
I'm also interested in a PCI expansion chassis. What is the best one out there? Are there any that can truly sustain high-end, specialty cards, such as AJA Kona, ATTO RAID controller, etc.? Looking for a solid recommendation.

- Jordan
 
I have been doing a lot of research into this and have found these companies:

Maxx Digital - They make the Mobile Rocket and Mobile Rocket Raid
http://maxxdigital.com/shop/index.php?cPath=153&osCsid=e5648853a8fe1ac3ece084ef205f1ca9

iStoragePro - The have the same products as Maxx Digital
http://www.istoragepro.com/prod.php?id=id8exp3

Dulce - They have a cool 7 slot x8 PCIe expander, but I don't like the form factor. Not real rackmount. Gets the job done though.
http://www.dulcesystems.com/html/pro_ex.html

Magma - They have several solutions from a small little desktop unit to a 4u 7 slot x8 PCIe expander that can have a few drives mounted inside.
http://www.magma.com/pciexpress.asp

Cubix - Makes a couple different PCIe extenders and is the only company I have found that has plans for a x16 PCIe expander. Their systems are really designed to add multiple GPUs to a system, but PCIe is PCIe, so it works with a lot more than just GPUs and have all 16 lanes available is great. They are working on a rackmount design, but again it is ment for adding GPUs, so the design leaves a lot to be desired n what I want.
http://www.cubixgpu.com/

JMR - Has the nicest set-up I have found for DIT type work, but the price is INSANE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They start at $15,000 where the rest of the companies top of the line is $3500 or so.
http://www.jmr.com/index.php?mode=products&view=extender

I have been talking to several of the companies about putting together something similar to the JMR BlueStor, but at a reasonable price.

I think the 4u Magma box is a really good option right now.


Dusty
 
Martin Greenwood said:
I recommend this one. It has a x16 uplink to the MacPro. So you can run 2 or 3 cards at full speed. Have tested with Red Rocket.
http://www.cyclone.com/products/expansion_systems/600-2706.php
Click to expand...

Still hoping to get a bit more info on this unit and it's reliability with REDRocket, RAID controllers, etc. Also, has anybody yet tried this enclosure with RAID storage? Looks like it has slots for three 5.25" drives and two 3.25" drives. Not sure what sort of drive configuration that implies... Thoughts?

- Jordan
 
Gotta chime in here. I bought the x16 Cyclone last november. The straight and simple answer here is that it works. That said, I didn't keep it long. There is some latency with the cable connection and it supposedly is worse on the 3m cable vs. the 1m that I bought it with. No support for PCIe 2.0 protocol, so it's not going to give you full bandwidth for the newer ATTO and Areca SAS cards or 10G NICs, etc..

I'm getting much more bang for the buck out of a second Mac Pro system to divide up my peripherals. I'm using the Gefen DVI|DL + USB KM switches to switch 3 systems sharing the same keyboard, mouse and dual 30" DELL displays. I already had the switches, so that helped -- they're expensive themselves.

With the expansion chassis, you're taking one perfectly good PCIe 2.0 X16 slot and trading it for a PCIe 1.1 X16 connection that lets you cram an X16 device an X8 device and two X4 devices into that one slot. Pretty easy to make it choke if you put the right stuff in there. In reality, it works just great for a Rocket and a RAID controller.

I guess it comes down to what each user wants out of the system. The expansion chassis can be half the price of another Mac tower. But the Mac tower will also get you more CPU power for rendering and other tasks.

For the original poster, I would recommend him removing the eSATA card and using the new SATA/SAS RAID card to also connect his eSATA devices. He's got a GT120 video card, which is kinda weak, but leaves the empty slot space over PCIe #1 open to run extra wires through (like the Rocket and / or from the Decklink card).
 
Thanks, Jeff. Did you have any firsthand experience using this unit with any internal hard drives in a RAID array? I want to know if speeds transcoding from REDRocket would be decent?

- Jordan
 
No, I did not set up internal hard drives / RAID in the unit. That actually was the plan, but didn't keep the unit long as I decided to go with a Mac tower and found myself a decently priced used '08 octomac.

I'm not sure how well it would perform. I suppose it depends on how much data it has to round-trip to the host system and back vs. how much can stay confined to the local PCIe bus within the cabinet.

When I briefly used the expansion unit, I had the RED Rocket and an ATTO H380 SAS card installed in it. I used the ATTO card to connect an HP 1760 LTO-4 and various eSATA devices (no RAIDs). It worked just fine for that it seemed. There were some glitches with the Rocket at the time and I don't know if it was related to the expansion system or general quirkyness of the older drivers. I've since consolidated everything in the two Mac towers. My Primary '09 tower has the following cards:

1: nVidia GTX285
2: RED Rocket
3: Kona3
4: ATTO R680 - external SAS RAID and eSATA connectivity

I would like to link these couple Macs and a few PC's via 10Gb ethernet, but my primary Mac tower that I just listed, doesn't have a free slot still. Always one short, sometimes two in the Mac world.
 
Dear Jeff,

Your MacPro tower setup is almost identical to mine. I've got the REDRocket, Kona LHi, and ATTO UL4D SCSI-3 RAID controller (which I swap all too often with Sonnet Tempo eSATA and ATTO R380 SAS RAID controller).

I was warned that the newer ATTO R680 was NOT compatible with eSATA fanout cable adaptors. If this is false, I would buy it immediately and ditch both my SCSI-3 as well as my Sonnet eSATA card and be good to go without any PCIe expansion.

The thing is, I need the SAS RAID to work with both SAS and eSATA devices, including RAID-5 arrays, and I've been advised against doing that on this forum.

- Jordan
 
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