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Sonnet Thunderbolt adapter - Macbook Air

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Patrick O'Sullivan

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We are currently struggling with ideas for onset offloading.

We have a macbook Air free with a thunderbolt port. Does anyone know if the following is possible:

Can we use the Sonnet thunderbolt adapter with the CalDigit Fasta-2ex 2-Port esata express card and hook up the Red Station in one esata port and our RAID set up in the other esata port?


Thanks


 
I just got the Sonnet thunderbolt adapter to use with a sonnet edge esata express 34 card and it didn't work for me. Maybe its dead on arrival because the adaptor won't keep the express34 card locked in place. Its easily pulled out when its supposed to be in the inserted position.

Danai
 
Apart form this setup working or not you - unfortunately - can always just pull out expresscard34 cards.
it is a springloaded mechanism that makes the card just kind of 'sit there', without being locked in place.

It is a bit of a design flaw if you ask me (which nobody ever does :-)


Danai Chutinaton said:
I just got the Sonnet thunderbolt adapter to use with a sonnet edge esata express 34 card and it didn't work for me. Maybe its dead on arrival because the adaptor won't keep the express34 card locked in place. Its easily pulled out when its supposed to be in the inserted position.

Danai
Click to expand...
 
axel ebermann said:
Apart form this setup working or not you - unfortunately - can always just pull out expresscard34 cards.
it is a springloaded mechanism that makes the card just kind of 'sit there', without being locked in place.

It is a bit of a design flaw if you ask me (which nobody ever does :-)
Click to expand...

Its very loose...much looser than I ever recall using express cards on my Macbook Pro. But thanks for the info, I did not realize this design flaw.

Using the Sonnet thunderbolt adapter, I could not get it to connect to my Drobo S which I currently use on my iMac via the firewire 800 port.

The sonnet express34 to e-sata card that i'm using with the thunderbolt adapter connects just fine to my Drobo S when used on my macbook pro vintage 2007.

Hopefully others will be more fortunate than me.
 
Tom.Wong said:
A. only sonnet cards work on the sonnet echo.
B. the sonnet echo doesn't work. period. will crash out the system non stop.
Click to expand...

That sucks...but LOL!!!

So yeah, I have a non working sonnet echo trying to get to work with a sonnet tempo edge. Must get RMA number.
 
Danai Chutinaton said:
That sucks...but LOL!!!

So yeah, I have a non working sonnet echo trying to get to work with a sonnet tempo edge. Must get RMA number.
Click to expand...

I don't get what they are doing right now, initial release of the echo there were drivers to download on their main page to get the echo working, and now there aren't. I don't know if a mac os update lets it work now, and if so, now I have to figure out how to uninstall those drivers. if not, than how are people supposed to even try to get it working right now? I've been really unhappy with Sonnet as of late, their so called prized esata card is flaky and has a hard time mounting more than one drive at a time, their qio was a disaster flooded with problems that people had to to work around, and they never really completely solved all the issues. and now this. I'm not holding my breath for their pci card chassis. Until they get the echo working flawlessly, the company is pretty much dead to me.
 
Driver issues for my Sonnet Q400s around the time of the Win7 release made several TBs of data impossible to recover.

The build quality, form factor, design features and component selection have made Sonnet's hardware a compelling choice. If only their drivers and general support acumen lived up to that level.

Cheers (well, actually jeers) - #19
 
I have the Echo working with my Tempo, Pro and the 6Gb/s card on my 17" MBP's with 10.7.2. Make sure that you boot with the Expresscard installed in the Echo for reliability. Unfortunately, there is a 20-30% reduction in write speeds over the standard Expresscard port, which is very disappointing. Card firmware needs to be TB aware for them to work with the Echo. Can't believe how Sonnet dropped the ball on this one, given the huge throughput of TB.
 
Tom.Wong said:
A. only sonnet cards work on the sonnet echo.
B. the sonnet echo doesn't work. period. will crash out the system non stop.
Click to expand...

C. Everything Tom just said is true.

I heard they pulled the drivers because of all the issues. But I don't know if that's true... The thing still needs drivers, at this time, to work with OSX.

This thing is garbage. Perhaps they will get it working right as the drivers mature. Until then, it's crap. And even if they do get it working right, it has some definite design flaws -- It's only ExpressCard v1.x when it should be 2.0 compliant. It uses some crappy off-brand or proprietary ExpressCard host interface that isn't supported by OSX natively, when it supports several better and more capable ones, which are also supported by Windows. So if they would have built this thing properly, it wouldn't have needed drivers at all. It doesn't have a pass-thru port for chaining more TB devices to it. So it has to be the last device on your chain, which sucks if you also want to run a display or other device that thinks it needs to be last.. And why make such a device and only put one ExpressCard slot in it? WTF? Give us at least two slots! Would sell a LOT more units because then it would actually be useful for offloading SxS media.
 
I have rarely had a good experience with Sonnet Drivers.

In fact. It's generally always been bad and I simply no longer trust them.

David
 
Sonnet sucks - in so many ways, across so many products. Don't rely on doing ANY kind of serious work with their products. Sadly. I wish someone would make a FAST card reader for SxS cards like the Qio that actually works.
 
I am curious to know if PC notebooks are performing faster than macbooks for this sort of jobs?
 
charles lim yi yong said:
I am curious to know if PC notebooks are performing faster than macbooks for this sort of jobs?
Click to expand...

There are currently no PC notebooks, that I'm aware of, which currently have Thunderbolt ports -- soon though, within the next few months. But if you mean in terms of connecting ExpressCard devices, I can say that most of the good notebooks with the ExpressCard slot perform just fine. They read or operate cards any faster than a 17" Macbook Pro, we're limited by the ExpressCard interface and more often than not, by the card itself.
 
Will this idea work:

We want to use the USB slot and plug in this: USB to Expresscard Adapter

In the adapter we will plug in the CalDigit 2 port expresscard.

Then connect the Red Station to one port and the RAID 1 enclosure to the other.

Will this work and what speeds will we be getting for transfer? Are we even going through the USB at all or will the files go from esata to esata?
 
Russ Campbell said:
I have the Echo working with my Tempo, Pro and the 6Gb/s card on my 17" MBP's with 10.7.2. Make sure that you boot with the Expresscard installed in the Echo for reliability. Unfortunately, there is a 20-30% reduction in write speeds over the standard Expresscard port, which is very disappointing. Card firmware needs to be TB aware for them to work with the Echo. Can't believe how Sonnet dropped the ball on this one, given the huge throughput of TB.
Click to expand...

Working fine on my 17" MBPro 10.7.2 as well

Slower than I would like because of the PCIe 1 issue, but I've used it every day since I bought it 3 weeks ago, not one crash

The whole Thunderbolt thing is starting to make me nervous though, I'll admit, although the Pegasus R4 and R6 have been getting good reviews
 
Patrick O'Sullivan said:
Will this idea work:

We want to use the USB slot and plug in this: USB to Expresscard Adapter

In the adapter we will plug in the CalDigit 2 port expresscard.

Then connect the Red Station to one port and the RAID 1 enclosure to the other.

Will this work and what speeds will we be getting for transfer? Are we even going through the USB at all or will the files go from esata to esata?
Click to expand...

That would be slow because you are limited by the very slow speeds of the usb2 port. May as well just plug your red station and hdd directly into the usb ports.
 
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