Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Register Log in
  • 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 :)

X-99 upgrade to TB3?

S

Shawn Richman

Active member
Joined
Jun 24, 2015
Messages
35
Reaction score
0
Points
0
Location
East Africa
Hey Guys,

Curious what PC people are doing with the newer Thunderbolt 3 and USB C devices.

I have a X-99 Asus E-WS motherboard and am looking at different PCI cards to slot in. Any suggestions as to what works?

I kinda remember reading awhile back that there was some stability issues with some early PCI cards.

Or should I just keep things going on the USB 3 bandwagon for a bit longer.

Just planning next RAID purchase and trying to figure out what connection to go for.

Thanks for the help!
 
The whole video over Thunderbolt thing is such a kludge. They really gotta figure out how to make it work internally over the PCIe without external cable hacks. It's pretty absurd.
 
You best option is to bump the board up;

https://www.asus.com/uk/Motherboards/X99-E-10G-WS/

Go for the next iteration with built in 10G, USB3.1 type A and C, then you've still got all your PCI-E slots free. The time taken to upgrade the board will be the biggest headache, but you can still sell on your old one for a decent price.
 
Interesting options! Thanks guys!

Is NAS the way everyone ends up going? I guess it bypasses the whole USB or Thunderbolt thing.

Say I go 10G interface one way or another. What type of RAID enclosure are people using? Are there companies that I should definitely go for and stay away from?

Is this a decent option- https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS1817#overview

A little hesitant to change the whole board out, as it is working super stable at the moment and have no complaints.

Tempted to stay USB 3 for awhile longer...with another areca 6bay. I do know that is just a patch though.
 
Also, What drives are people liking at the moment?

Is the WD RED PRO 4tb the one to go for, or are the larger drives proving reliable?
 
It all comes down to your needs and budget.

How much data do you want to store on the system ?
Does it have to be external (USB 3, USB3.1 gen2, Thunderbolt, external raid box, NAS,...) ?
When internal, how much space do you have left in your case and how many open PCIe lanes are availlible ?
What is the projected speed you need in MB/s ?
How secure and at what speed do you want your data (RAID 0,1,5,10,6,50,60) to be accesible ?
When using large drive I would at least opt for RAID 10 or 6.

How does your current storage look like?

I know, more questions...
 
Just to chime in as I recently did the mac to PC switch.

I have the x-99 Deluxe II board with a TB3 card dropped in.

After much research I decicded to go with a TB3 to TB2 adaptor and picked up a Pegasus2 r6 (thunderbolt 2) Raid as they are a pretty good deal. I actually saw a Pegasus2 r8 go for $1800 on ebay recently. Mine is 6 drives total and I have 3 drives raided together and then the batch is mirrored for safety. I have around 6gb this way and use it for all active projects. Then offload to something less secure when I'm done as backup. This is plenty for my dragon footage but this thing could be much faster clearly as Raid 5

Pegasus also has TB3 enclosures with their raids.

also, a big fan of Backblaze as my connected drives are being upladed to the cloud for $5/month with unlimited space.

The reason I bring them up is they post Hard drive reliability reports


https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-rates-q1-2017/
 
Misha, thanks for the questions!

I know that is how it works haha

I currently have a USB3 Areca 6 bay with 24tb in a RAID 5. Then I have 3 4tb drives inside the tower that are JBOD. Then I have some external drives for moving stuff around.

For speed, 300mb is nice. I would rather safety then speed.

I do have 2 more slots left in the tower and I have I think 3-4 pci lanes left. Should I drop a few more drives inside and get an areca controller? never done an internal RAID.

I might get that thunderbolt adaptor for now and then convert my system to a 10 Gbase workflow in the future.

I know there is a 3-2-1 system for redundancy but it is difficult working in the middle of the bush in East Africa to have complete safety. Conservation work is rewarding in so many ways, but financially is tough so cant just go crazy.

I like what Maciek spoke of with Backblaze and their unlimited upload option. I will just have to use the entire 5mb upload bandwidth that I can get lol.

As for how much data I need to store... we shoot like crazy then cut it all down and park it till we need it. I would love to get another 24tb at least, that would probably last me another 6-10 months.

I was looking at WD's new RED Pro 10tb drives with 256mb cache. What do we think of those? 6 of those in a tower would give me more then enough space for awhile...

Thanks for all the advice! So nice having other people to bounce ideas off of and one of the best things about owning a RED.
 
And Maciek,

Thanks for all that info. I might do what you did and get one of those Pegasus r6's and an adaptor. How do you like it? what speeds you getting with your setup?

Also, thanks so much for mentioning Backblaze, I knew they did reliability reports but did not know about the unlimited upload plan. super cool!
 
Is there actually any really good motherboards that actually support Thunderbolt3 on PC? Feels like compared to Apple, the speeds are never there, never really working. I've been waiting ages for true Thunderbolt support on the PC side, but nothings really been on par with the speeds I get on my regular Macbook Pro. I've been waiting to try out some TB3 RAID enclosures with SSDs to create really high speed work drives that I can use on both PC and Mac, but I'm still waiting for PC motherboards to actually be good.
 
In my experience stay away from ASRock for right now, I've got a mini-itx pc with TB3 and their firmware is ancient. When I connect drives or egpu my computer crashes, and I've read reports of others having the same issues. It was such a bad crash a couple times trying to figure it all out I had to reinstall everything from step 1. From talking with some of the TB3 peripheral manufacturers, its a complete shit show when it comes to TB3 firmware updates. My understanding is intel gives the basic firmware and its up to the motherboard manufacturers to update it to their specific system. So some of them are running ancient firmware and not updating their systems and that causes issues. Support at ASRock is also a nightmare, every question goes to someone in the USA and then gets translated and routed to asia and back to the states...so one question takes like a month to get answered..I've been going around in circles with them for months.
 
Shawn,

I really like the Pegasus. I was going to go with either this or a Synology (I believe...as it's been a few months) but multiple recommendations swayed me. It's been great so far and the reviews on their products are very good regarding reliability. As far as speeds go, as I mentioned before I currently have my R6 stripped as Raid 0+1 and I'm getting 626 MB/s Read, 582 MB/s Write. It can be stripped to be much faster. Since TB2 does 2500 MB/s or 20 GBs there's no reason for me to buy the more expensive TB3 enclosure at the moment as this is more than sufficient for my scenerio.


Christoffer,

As I mentioned before I had switched from mac to pc recently and having all my drives be thunderbolt it was important to find a solution. I was lucky that the computer I bought from Puget Systems (Which I can't say enough good things about) uses the Asus x99 Deluxe II board which comes with a Thunderblot card provided by Asus specifically for that motherboard. After finding somebody's post regarding their bios settings I was able to get my card working and it's been perfect since day one.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top