New Ivy Mainboard for a new Hacky... Thunderbolt? Yes or No?

[derpuma]

How about thunderbolt? Will this be an option on the number of PC Boards wich came out with an interface? Maybe in Mountain Lion?
So is it worth to spend more money to be able to have thunderbolt in near future?
Is there any Information out if the chipset on the available boards will be compatible with OSX?

thx in advance...
derpuma

 

[Jamesbond007]

How about thunderbolt? Will this be an option on the number of PC Boards which came out with an interface? Maybe in Mountain Lion?
So is it worth to spend more money to be able to have thunderbolt in near future?
Is there any Information out if the chipset on the available boards will be compatible with OSX?

thx in advance...
derpuma

At this point we have no idea whether the Thunderbolt on those motherboards that have it can be made to work under Mac OSX. So if you want to have Thunderbolt in a hackintosh, your best option is to wait and see if it is possible for Thunderbolt to work under OSX in a hackintosh.

 

[Going Bald]

Do you really need it? Do you spend much time transferring files? Especially large files from a working directory on your HDD/SSD to/from external storage bay? Do you attach the storage bay via eSATA, USB or network?
Can you afford to buy a Thunderbolt capable external storage bay (they ain't cheap) and do you need one?

If the answer to these questions is no, then it is not worth the extra cost. Not sure if TB would even be better than NAS. Guess it would depend on your NIC and how fast your network is, in which case the bottleneck would be the read time of the HDD.

 

[derpuma]

Do you really need it? Do you spend much time transferring files? Especially large files from a working directory on your HDD/SSD to/from external storage bay? Do you attach the storage bay via eSATA, USB or network?
Can you afford to buy a Thunderbolt capable external storage bay (they ain't cheap) and do you need one?

If the answer to these questions is no, then it is not worth the extra cost. Not sure if TB would even be better than NAS. Guess it would depend on your NIC and how fast your network is, in which case the bottleneck would be the read time of the HDD.

Video Edeting of HD 1920p and 4K Video Material sometimes is a hack, even on RAID. With Thunderbolt it would be pretty easy to swap from my studio mac to my home hacky and work on projects at the weekend and still have full speed data via TH.
So teh plan is to get 2 news Hackys with working TH to transport heavy Data (some videoprojekts are more than 200-300GB of Source Material) and copying this is even a hack via esata and nill practicable via NAS.

 

[Gordo74]

Do you really need it? Do you spend much time transferring files? Especially large files from a working directory on your HDD/SSD to/from external storage bay? Do you attach the storage bay via eSATA, USB or network?
Can you afford to buy a Thunderbolt capable external storage bay (they ain't cheap) and do you need one?

If the answer to these questions is no, then it is not worth the extra cost. Not sure if TB would even be better than NAS. Guess it would depend on your NIC and how fast your network is, in which case the bottleneck would be the read time of the HDD.

Video Edeting of HD 1920p and 4K Video Material sometimes is a hack, even on RAID. With Thunderbolt it would be pretty easy to swap from my studio mac to my home hacky and work on projects at the weekend and still have full speed data via TH.
So teh plan is to get 2 news Hackys with working TH to transport heavy Data (some videoprojekts are more than 200-300GB of Source Material) and copying this is even a hack via esata and nill practicable via NAS.

Why wouldn't you do the work on the internal hard drives and then just save it to an external when you go between places? If internal RAID isn't fast enough, that is a limitation of the disks and not the interface.

 

[derpuma]

Why wouldn't you do the work on the internal hard drives and then just save it to an external when you go between places? If internal RAID isn't fast enough, that is a limitation of the disks and not the interface.

Right now the internal Raid is not the limit! My old Higpoint SATA 3.0 Raidcontroller delivers more than 470MB/s with 4x 7200 Samsung HDs in Raid 0. The most i can get out of 4 DiskDisks - nearly full Speed. My OSX is on a 120GB SSD with a SATA 6.0 PCI Card and gives me 480 MB/s.

The Problem is the fact, that copying of 200-300GB of Data each evening or before a weekend isnt don in minutes, that sucks. 300GB take somthing around 45min. via eSata to a single HDD.
With a thunderbot Enclosure and 3x SSD I am able tro achieve more than 1200MB/s, and that in a portable way. Just disconect it at the workstation at my office, connect it at home and work flawless with very high performance...

 

[Gordo74]

The Problem is the fact, that copying of 200-300GB of Data each evening or before a weekend isnt don in minutes, that sucks. 300GB take somthing around 45min. via eSata to a single HDD.
With a thunderbot Enclosure and 3x SSD I am able tro achieve more than 1200MB/s, and that in a portable way. Just disconect it at the workstation at my office, connect it at home and work flawless with very high performance...

That makes sense, but keep in mind that 1200MB/s is the THEORHETICAL max of thunderbolt at this point. You will probably see speeds around 700-800 in daily use.

That being said, you could probably do this for MUCH cheaper by just getting a RAID enclosure that supports eSATA, as you arent coming close to maxing it out with one HDD.

 

[derpuma]

The Problem is the fact, that copying of 200-300GB of Data each evening or before a weekend isnt don in minutes, that sucks. 300GB take somthing around 45min. via eSata to a single HDD.
With a thunderbot Enclosure and 3x SSD I am able tro achieve more than 1200MB/s, and that in a portable way. Just disconect it at the workstation at my office, connect it at home and work flawless with very high performance...

That makes sense, but keep in mind that 1200MB/s is the THEORHETICAL max of thunderbolt at this point. You will probably see speeds around 700-800 in daily use.

That being said, you could probably do this for MUCH cheaper by just getting a RAID enclosure that supports eSATA, as you arent coming close to maxing it out with one HDD.

Lets do the maths:
2 raidcontroller with 6gb/s with esata lets say 350 bucks each
1 esata 4bay raid enclosure 250 bucks
4x120 gb ssd 400
= 1400 bucks

2 thunderbolt mainboards 250 each
Thunderbolt enclosure from WD 450 bucks (replace the hdds with ssds)
2 ssd 240 gb 400 bucks
= 1350 bucks

Almost the same amount of investment

 

[Gordo74]

Lets do the maths:
2 raidcontroller with 6gb/s with esata lets say 350 bucks each
1 esata 4bay raid enclosure 250 bucks
4x120 gb ssd 400
= 1400 bucks

2 thunderbolt mainboards 250 each
Thunderbolt enclosure from WD 450 bucks (replace the hdds with ssds)
2 ssd 240 gb 400 bucks
= 1350 bucks

Almost the same amount of investment

I don't think you'd need to use SSDs if your 4x Samsung drives are doing fine. Plus you're wasting a lot of bandwidth because you'd saturate the one eSATA port with HDDs only... Let's do the realistic math.

Enclosure ($120): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816132029
4x HDDs ($240) : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822152181

Connect the eSATA port to your internal SATA mobo header.

Total cost: $360 and you saturate the eSATA bus. (3Gb/s which would be 375MB/sec) = 13 minutes for a 300GB file

Whereas, for thunderbolt, you are correct, it would be $1400ish... $1100 bucks is NOT worth 5ish minutes of my time every day.

 

[derpuma]

Lets do the maths:
2 raidcontroller with 6gb/s with esata lets say 350 bucks each
1 esata 4bay raid enclosure 250 bucks
4x120 gb ssd 400
= 1400 bucks

2 thunderbolt mainboards 250 each
Thunderbolt enclosure from WD 450 bucks (replace the hdds with ssds)
2 ssd 240 gb 400 bucks
= 1350 bucks

Almost the same amount of investment

I don't think you'd need to use SSDs if your 4x Samsung drives are doing fine. Plus you're wasting a lot of bandwidth because you'd saturate the one eSATA port with HDDs only... Let's do the realistic math.

Enclosure ($120): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816132029
4x HDDs ($240) : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822152181

Connect the eSATA port to your internal SATA mobo header.

Total cost: $360 and you saturate the eSATA bus. (3Gb/s which would be 375MB/sec) = 13 minutes for a 300GB file

Whereas, for thunderbolt, you are correct, it would be $1400ish... $1100 bucks is NOT worth 5ish minutes of my time every day.

No way... Have you ever owend an enclosure like the one you recomended? I have three 5-bay sata - esata enclosures in my office for data backup. These enclosures are using an internal chipset for port multiplying. 1 esata cable connects to esata pcie esata card. Mine using a siliconeimage chipset, sil3132 and i need this special pcie 1x card to connect the enclosure to the mac. Not possible to connect it to internal motherboard esata wich doesnt support port multiplying, for me in my asus ws revolution, not sure if newer mainboards can do. And for me and my board its slow. Its softwareraid and this maxed out at 85MB/s. In raid5 mode speed drops to 35-45MB/s. In this case for me the Gigabit ethernet copy of files is faster then transfers to an enclosure you recomend.

And if port multiplying really works with newer mainboards, and i have to spend mony for this, then i will def wait and goto thunderbolt... And how will you get 4 HDDs in a raid0 without a raid controller?

This is the enclosure i use! Only 100 bucks!
http://www.one-technologies.com/DE/htm_esata_raid.php