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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Sonnet Thunderbolt Goodies

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Matt Johnston

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http://www.sonnettech.com/news/nab2011/index.html

Thunderbolt PCI Expansion boxes and RAID enclosures.

Somewhat curious that they also released a Thunderbolt -> FW800 and GigE adapter but no eSata... One I really want.

I need a fast portable RAID for 2 shoots (with same day deadlines) at the end of this month. Going to have to use FW800 it looks like, barf.
 
Matt Johnston said:
http://www.sonnettech.com/news/nab2011/index.html

Thunderbolt PCI Expansion boxes and RAID enclosures.

Somewhat curious that they also released a Thunderbolt -> FW800 and GigE adapter but no eSata... One I really want.

I need a fast portable RAID for 2 shoots (with same day deadlines) at the end of this month. Going to have to use FW800 it looks like, barf.
Click to expand...

What kind of Benchmarks are we looking at?
 
I hope they come out, or someone comes out with a full 10g ethernet to thunderbolt adapter, and i'm hoping for big multi port hubs too, with esata and usb 3 to thunderbolt. says can daisy chain up to 6 devices. sounds great, but daisy chaining gets me worried since the firewire days with multiple nightmare stories. (one drive dying taking the daisy chained drive with it) i wonder if there are any safe guards with that happening.
 
$499 and end of August is what I'm hearing from the Sonnet sales rep I talked to today regarding the Thunderbolt PCIe expansion box

Same date for the rest of their Thunderbolt stuff, YEAH BABY
 
i believe there are no controller boards for estata at present....BUT, that's going to be the NEXT item up....once Intel releases that to 3rd parties, then we'll see t-bolt allow us to daisy chain the 5 bay drives via e-stata INSTEAD of firewire 800.
 
I have a 17" MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt. My plan is to get a Scarlet Fixed when it comes out.

With the Sonnet Thunderbolt products coming out I will be able to use PCIe cards like a Mac Pro. I can use Red Rocket. I can use a CUDA card for Adobe. I am thinking this will work tremendously well.
 
John C Picking Jr said:
I have a 17" MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt. My plan is to get a Scarlet Fixed when it comes out.

With the Sonnet Thunderbolt products coming out I will be able to use PCIe cards like a Mac Pro. I can use Red Rocket. I can use a CUDA card for Adobe. I am thinking this will work tremendously well.
Click to expand...

I think you are right. Should be a killer portable rig as long as RAM limitations don't hinder.
 
John C Picking Jr said:
I have a 17" MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt. My plan is to get a Scarlet Fixed when it comes out.

With the Sonnet Thunderbolt products coming out I will be able to use PCIe cards like a Mac Pro. I can use Red Rocket. I can use a CUDA card for Adobe. I am thinking this will work tremendously well.
Click to expand...

Sorry, I'm kind of lost. How to connect Red Rocket and CUDA cards on a Macbook Pro. It sound just too cool to be true!
 
With this expansion you can put a Atto H380... Much better than just a 2 port or 1 Port E-sata card. You can hook up Red's CF/SSD reader etc... with the proper cable to the H380. Then use the expresscard slot for a regular sil3132 e-sata card so you can hook up one of the E-sata Raids. Another option is to go for a x8 bay SAS RAID, and use the e-sata expresscard for SSD/CF readers... I can see dozens of options... Particularly AJA/BM HD-SDI on a laptop... Thats serious!!!

I pretty much use exclusively SAS on my desktop setup, x1 H6F0 and x1 H380, another H380 instead of e-sata sil3132 if I need more SAS Channels. I'm only limited by the read/write of HDD's... If I can have this many connections on a Laptop, it really becomes a serious setup.
 
Sonnet is crap from my experience. Have tried a wide range of their products and had problems with all of them at some point - everything from firmware issues, driver instability, system crashes to hardware faults. I'm waiting for Caldigit and GTech, thats for sure!
 
Tony,

I know what you talking about, I had really bad experience with their SATA RAID system. However, if the driver and the firmware is issue, in case of expansion chassis, is pretty much straight forward, so I'm thinking it will be worth trying.
 
Looking forward to hear everyone else's experience before I spend money on this :-)
 
Alex Carr said:
If I can have this many connections on a Laptop, it really becomes a serious setup.
Click to expand...

I heard a rumor that you can't use the Thunderbolt and the ExpressCard at the same time. I hope this is not the case as this was one of the main reasons I went with the 17". Can anyone confirm that they both work at the same time?
 
Curran Giddens said:
I heard a rumor that you can't use the Thunderbolt and the ExpressCard at the same time. I hope this is not the case as this was one of the main reasons I went with the 17". Can anyone confirm that they both work at the same time?
Click to expand...

TOTALLY FALSE, ABSOLUTELY UNTRUE, BULLSHIT FUD! Some dickhead over at AppleInsider decided to make up some crap like that in their review of the Promise Pegasus ThunderBolt RAID... WTF??? No basis for it, makes no sense at all. A few of us here, including myself and Stephen Lovett, are currently running these new ThunderBolt (Promise) RAIDs and can still use our ExpressCards just fine. The ThunderBolt host sits separately on the PCIe bus from the ExpressCard device anyway, so I don't know why anyone would ever think this to be an issue. FWIW, I can connect my RED STATION 1.8" module to my CalDigit ExpressCard34 eSATA adapter and I can offload my SSDs at over 200MB/s to the ThunderBolt RAID.

I can't believe the FUD that is circling lately...
 
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