Even after he says Google is the source of his information? The web is an interesting way to get facts these days, something that didn't even exists in the sixties when I was going to school. Like a library it is a resource everybody should learn to leverage.
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Originally Posted by marvfox
Marvin is a walking book of knowledge and very helpful all the time.
Accessible slots don't work so well for the Fusion drive setup though because if someone removes one drive, it would break it. Also, they obviously wanted 3.5" drives for the extra capacity and they are better being tightly secured to minimize noise. I'd be quite happy with an option where they put a blade SSD screwed in beside the RAM slots on the 27" and offered a 256GB and 512GB option on its own. There aren't really many competitively priced blade SSDs. There's a chance the SSD could get too hot that way but they can probably cool it down quite easily and it's a setup I'd prefer.
The problem there though is sustaining a large company. If you sell a product that will mean you saturate the market very quickly, the sales will start to tail off and you might have to downsize the company. There are two sides to the ethics of this because while technological progress means that consumers get better products at lower prices, it's harder for companies to sustain growth and jobs will be lost all the way from manufacuring to retail.
Given that fusion drives are a combination of two drives, you have a higher chance of failure. I wish they were serviceable. Beyond that it's not always a good idea to use disks up to the point where they stop working. It's possible for drives to become flaky prior to that, although I doubt most people recognize that.
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I think the way they do things now is the better way simply because the whole reason anybody really does anything is to try and improve the quality of life and having a sustainable economic model is more important to this than having technology that isn't really essential. There's a balance that has to be made so that we don't just have to put up with junk products as that affects growth too but it wouldn't be wise of them to give us everything all at once. I really wonder what's going to happen to the whole tech industry in another 20-30 years given how far it has come in that time. It seems very much like computers will go the way of televisions and it all just becomes about the services. No doubt that's why companies are making moves to develop their own OS as that's the only guaranteed point of leverage anyone will eventually have over profitable services.
I already view them as appliance like. All of the computer parts stores with the exception of Frys went out of business long ago.
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Right now, HDDs are around $0.05/GB and SSD is $0.60/GB. I can see all manufacturers just ditching HDDs and moving to faster, more profitable SSDs. There's not much point in having 200TB drives if it can still only read/write at 150MB/s and more importantly has really low random read/write speeds. SSD just needs to get down to $0.10/GB to replace any size of HDD because you can just stick more chips in. There's not the same weight and noise issues like with mechanical platters. Imagine in 2 years, they half SSD prices to get to $0.30/GB and another 2 years, it's $0.15/GB, you'd potentially get a 2TB 2.5" SSD for $300. Even if you can get a single 20TB HDD for the same price, people will still need RAID systems for reliability and if you have files that take up that much space, you need high performance.
NAND hasn't always been profitable while HDDs have been profitable. Here is a Forbes article on Western Digital if you don't believe me. Don't mistake higher pricing for extremely profitable. Now that is often how transitions happen. CRT to LCD happened due to profitability. It took years to get LCDs of reasonable quality for any kind of specialized use, even with significantly higher price points. Everyone complained about HDD pricing after the floods, yet the manufacturers did quite well in the aftermath.
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I doubt we'll ever see consumer HDDs that are 60TB+ in size because the market appeal for them would be so small. I can see them focusing on speed more than capacity to the point that RAM and storage are one and the same - in effect 2TB of storage becomes 2TB of RAM and video memory or at the very least is tiered storage with small amounts of very fast memory and of course all soldered to the motherboard. While it seems crazy now to solder storage to the motherboard, when computers are so inexpensive, it will be a better model to just replace the whole board. The iPad Mini is $329, which means the parts cost less than $200 and that includes the display. For any board or chip failure, they'd charge $100 for the whole part.
There are a few but you wouldn't say that there aren't as many consumer grade expressCard or PCIe cards as USB 3 products. The problem is that people class Thunderbolt as just a competitor to USB 3 and it's really missing the point of what Thunderbolt is. It's essentially a faster expressCard merged with the mini-displayport output.
I don't necessarily see this happening in the near future. It could happen eventually. If you look at computers, the functions they cover for the average individual are largely dependent on their capability. Computers were around at the time of VCRs, yet even if the footage was scanned and digitally graded, we didn't have consumer grade storage mediums appropriate for such use. I just used that because it's an easy example. Soldering parts doesn't always lower costs. Motherboard manufacturers were concerned about the BGA rumor from intel, as such changes could increase their costs. If intel was able to build the majority of the motherboard functions into the cpu package, that might be different.
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There's a premium for the faster ports and active cables. Lacie's drives come with a $50 premium. G-tech is a bit more with 4TB USB 3 at $399 and with Thunderbolt, $538. Thunderbolt needs more volume, cheaper parts and faster licensing steps but it takes time for this to happen. The problem as always lies with cheap product manufacturers that side with USB 3 because it's good enough but it will never negate the need for multi-protocol ports.
External hard drives tend to carry crappy margins. If you need a lot of them, it makes more sense to pick up a decent JBOD or Raid box. eSATA used to be the only somewhat cheap option with decent performance, but I welcome USB3 for a reason, as it's cuts out the use of third party HBAs that are not directly supported by Apple. When I dealt with those, I tried to at least use host cards and storage boxes that contained the same brand of hardware or at least the same chipset brand in each to minimize issues. Even then it's somewhat hit and miss finding this stuff on OSX. I wouldn't suggest many of them today simply because support seems to be dropping off. In spite of the issues with usb3, I would rather test something based on that. With thunderbolt I'm kind of waiting to see how it shakes out. Right now you have a maximum of two ports out, and effective daisy chaining seems limited to Apple's own peripheral devices. I figured they really only backed thunderbolt for those things and figured anything else was a bonus. It runs over a connector that they already used anyway. If you look at a 2010 macbook pro and a 2011, both have the mini displayport connector on the upper left by the ethernet port.
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It goes to 20Gbps per channel next year as they will use PCIe 3 lanes. Displayport 1.2 will be supported this year and is enough for 4k resolution.
A Thunderbolt cable wouldn't even plug into the display though so it's not even remotely a problem with Thunderbolt and I doubt it's a widespread issue. The laptops and Minis have HDMI for consumer displays.
Would you have hesitated to buy an eSATA drive? That standard is going to totally die out in favour of USB 3. At the end of the day, consumer electronics is like cars.You don't expect to have the same car for more than 10 years because you'd be able to afford a better one after that period of time. If a new storage standard comes along, you copy the data over to it and move on with your life.
I would hesitate to invest in hardware that requires eSATA today. If you need a few drives, that can be anywhere from a few hundred to a couple thousand or more depending on capacity and configuration. Mac options are a little limited today. I was going to say I would probably look at Areca, but their page is abit out of date. There isn't that much available in really good external storage today. LaCie and the others you regularly reference are popular because they're marketed well. They aren't that great. Try calling LaCie's sales or tech support to ask a simple product question. They never have an answer as they do little beyond marketing pretty things. There are a few raid and jbod boxes that have multiple io outputs such as esata/usb3/sas or thunderbolt. I haven't tested any of them. I dislike Apple's solution there. The store has too many listed complaints on it. I would rather pay for a decent raid box, populate it with drives that meet my needs (Caviar Black for most configurations or RE-4s for any parity based raid), and test it myself prior to placing it in service. Something pre-configured should show up and work near 100% of the time.
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You make out like Apple will get bored with Thunderbolt and just phase it out within 1-2 years. People said the same with displayport vs the much more widely adopted HDMI. They co-exist now just like TB and USB 3.
I would like to see how it catches on overall. Intel also hinted that it would come down to the amount of bandwidth people will pay for in the end. I may be more interested in its revision B, especially if it supports up to 4k as well as data.
With thunderbolt I'm kind of waiting to see how it shakes out. Right now you have a maximum of two ports out, and effective daisy chaining seems limited to Apple's own peripheral devices.
A fair amount of devces have two ports for daisy chaining, it's certainly not limited to Apple's devices. You've seen the demos.
LaCie and the others you regularly reference are popular because they're marketed well. They aren't that great. Try calling LaCie's sales or tech support to ask a simple product question.
A question like what - 'does it come in anything other than grey'? It's a hard drive, how complicated can it be? You plug it in; if it's broken, you send it back. The reviews for Lacie products don't seem to be all that bad:
and it's still only dozens of people out of many thousands of drives sold. Lacie also isn't the only TB manufacturer. If people mention Pegasus, the reaction is that people always mention Pegasus and they are too pricey; if it's Lacie, the support sucks; if it's anyone else there aren't enough choices for TB solutions.
There are hardly any HDD manufacturers left. They all merged into Seagate and WD and they both have Thunderbolt drives. In terms of TB drive bundle providers, there's Promise (Pegasus), Lacie, Seagate, WD, Elgato, G-Tech, Buffalo, Drobo. Who else needs to make a Thunderbolt hard drive?
What drive setup would you in fact recommend over any of those Thunderbolt products? You mentioned a decent RAID box with Caviar Black drives so which enclosure? The Pegasus R4 4TB is $1099 and 4 Caviar Blacks would be 4 x $120 = $480 so the 4 bay enclosure would have to be $620 tops.
I would like to see how it catches on overall. Intel also hinted that it would come down to the amount of bandwidth people will pay for in the end. I may be more interested in its revision B, especially if it supports up to 4k as well as data.
Do you have a 4k display that means you need 4k + data or is this one of those artificially high minimum requirements? If it supports your single imaginary 4k display on one port, you have the other port and USB 3 to use for data.
Only sometimes? I think the Internet is filled with garbage and google is the worst design for a search engi e. all based on who has the most hits, stemming from their PageRank system. I still have trouble finding what I'm looking for. And then needing to validate the info. Don't get me wrong, the Internet is a great resource ...
A fair amount of devces have two ports for daisy chaining, it's certainly not limited to Apple's devices.
Not nearly enough. The fact that anyone has to read the specs of a device to verify it is pretty sad. It's not something I ever needed to think about with Firewire devices. It's like the USB mentality has infected the TB device world. The problem being, USB ports are plentiful, USB hubs are plentiful, it's hard to say that with TB.
And Apple sells those dongles. Fair enough, a second port is a bit much for those devices, but it shouldn't be a question for a larger device.
I don't consider LaCie because of support experiences I've heard from hmm and others around the net, and considerable issues with premature failures. A premium brand should have premium support.
High up in this page:
Additionally, you can daisy-chain up to six Thunderbolt devices to maximize use of a single port†.
Fine print (way at the bottom of the page) †MiniStation Thunderbolt does not have a Thunderbolt pass-through port so it must be the last device on a daisy-chain.
If Intel really does have stringent approval process, I don't understand why they let this product and Seagate's little TB sled go without a second port.
On another note, many people don't seem to realize that Apple has already cleared some headspace for the new Pro in the lineup.
There isn't an iMac configuration over 2K anymore.
The new Pro could start at $2049 (with no display), representing a $500. price drop, and still not hurt consumer sales of the iMac.
I think the top-end 27" was always $1999 but had BTO options to take it above, which are still there. If you configure it with the i7, it goes to $2200 and with the GTX 680M, it goes to $2350. I don't think it would affect iMac sales much if the next Pro started at $2k though because you still need a display and the minimum for an equivalent display would be $650. Apple would be making large enough margins on the Mac Pro sale anyway that they'd probably make more from the Pro sale than the iMac sale.
I think the Internet is filled with garbage and google is the worst design for a search engi e. all based on who has the most hits, stemming from their PageRank system. I still have trouble finding what I'm looking for.
I have the same trouble trying to get the results I'm looking for. There are far too many spam results and the UI is not very good. For some reason Bing has copied it almost exactly and has worse results. I'd quite like to see a set of results like Apple's Top Sites view. A grid of 5 x 5 icons with just the domain name + text snippet and it would expand to the size of the browser window vertically with more items so I can page through results without scrolling down and be able to have file-based anonymous profiles so that the browser remembers different search preferences and there can be multiple profiles that can be removed, synced or deleted easily without needing any logins.
One of the most helpful Google options is the minus character where you just add something like -Samsung and it eliminates all the results you aren't interested in. You can also use things like filetype:pdf e.g ipad filetype:pdf if you want to find reference documents. Quotes helps for phrases. You can also search some of the known sites like anandtech with things like site:anandtech.com thunderbolt review -htc.
USB hubs are plentiful, it's hard to say that with TB.
Yes, there really needs to be a Thunderbolt hub of some sort that gives you say 4 ports out of a single port. I'm not sure why nobody has built those yet. It would only need one controller for all the ports. Maybe Apple or even Intel can come up with one but it's needed for those situations where manufacturers don't put an extra port on. maybe they want to encourage people to put the extra port on their devices but they won't all do it.
Yes, there really needs to be a Thunderbolt hub of some sort that gives you say 4 ports out of a single port. I'm not sure why nobody has built those yet. It would only need one controller for all the ports. Maybe Apple or even Intel can come up with one but it's needed for those situations where manufacturers don't put an extra port on. maybe they want to encourage people to put the extra port on their devices but they won't all do it.
I'm thinking that Thunderbolt development is relatively expensive and third parties know that the move to optical is imminent.
This might not affect peripherals, but that's a big guess if you're throwing down millions on design and production.
Yes, there really needs to be a Thunderbolt hub of some sort that gives you say 4 ports out of a single port. I'm not sure why nobody has built those yet.
What about the video requirements of such a device?
What about the video requirements of such a device?
It should be able to work the same way as the Cinema displays, which can be chained together. If too many displays are attached, the remaining ones would just stay dark, which is what happens now. I'd expect the hub to support up to 2 displays on the current controllers and allow them to be connected to any hub port and in 2014, up to 4 displays.
It should be able to work the same way as the Cinema displays, which can be chained together. If too many displays are attached, the remaining ones would just stay dark, which is what happens now.
Ah, that was my only concern. I didn't think they'd let something like that happen, but since they already do…
Hey, is it true that you can't use three displays on the current crop of Mac Pro graphics cards unless BOTH of the Mini DispayPort ports have a POWERED adapter (meaning Apple's $100 dual-link DVI to MDP adapter)? Or how does that all work out?
This whole idea that Apple needs headspace is totally bogus. IMacs and Mac Pros sell into entirely different markets. Pricing of one has zero impact on the desirability of the other.
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Originally Posted by Frank777
True. And this is the first time Apple's actually had a real, justifiable excuse for sealing the machine.
So you can expect them to double down on Fusion.
On another note, many people don't seem to realize that Apple has already cleared some headspace for the new Pro in the lineup.
There isn't an iMac configuration over 2K anymore.
The new Pro could start at $2049 (with no display), representing a $500. price drop, and still not hurt consumer sales of the iMac.
It is a fantastic source for the technically inclined. I've been around long enough to know what it was like to get tech manuals, data sheets and other documentation before the Internet. This access really does level the playing field and means that any body any where on the planet can innovate if they so desire.
Now obviously Google isn't perfect. However neither are web sites maintained by the likes of Intel or TI. The alternative or rather the practice in the past though was terrible.
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Originally Posted by PhilBoogie
Only sometimes? I think the Internet is filled with garbage and google is the worst design for a search engi e. all based on who has the most hits, stemming from their PageRank system. I still have trouble finding what I'm looking for. And then needing to validate the info. Don't get me wrong, the Internet is a great resource ...
This whole idea that Apple needs headspace is totally bogus. IMacs and Mac Pros sell into entirely different markets. Pricing of one has zero impact on the desirability of the other.
It may be bogus to you, but their past behavior suggests they may think this way. I think if they're going to retain a fairly high cost of entry, the hardware specs should justify at least justify the price.
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Originally Posted by Marvin
A fair amount of devces have two ports for daisy chaining, it's certainly not limited to Apple's devices. You've seen the demos.
A question like what - 'does it come in anything other than grey'? It's a hard drive, how complicated can it be? You plug it in; if it's broken, you send it back. The reviews for Lacie products don't seem to be all that bad:
and it's still only dozens of people out of many thousands of drives sold. Lacie also isn't the only TB manufacturer. If people mention Pegasus, the reaction is that people always mention Pegasus and they are too pricey; if it's Lacie, the support sucks; if it's anyone else there aren't enough choices for TB solutions.
My experience with Lacie is that they are not designed for heavy use. The usual complaint is a dead drive just outside of warranty. It's not always the drive itself. I saw this constantly with their older firewire drives. It was often a burnt firewire bridge (bridge, bridgeport, something like that, can't remember the exact part name). With single drive solutions you could always pry open the case and attempt to mount the bare drive in something else. That wouldn't work with the ones that used 2 drives in a Raid 0 internally.
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There are hardly any HDD manufacturers left. They all merged into Seagate and WD and they both have Thunderbolt drives. In terms of TB drive bundle providers, there's Promise (Pegasus), Lacie, Seagate, WD, Elgato, G-Tech, Buffalo, Drobo. Who else needs to make a Thunderbolt hard drive?
I didn't say many HDD manufacturers were left. Seagate and Western Digital are the only ones out of those that actually manufacture the hard drives themselves. They have both retained profitability. Seeing as you included companies that make external hard drives as opposed to the hard drives themselves, those guys still sell on relatively thin margins. To go to ssds, they would have to leverage performance. If it's just a backup solution, speed is a minor factor. I suspect they'll eat low end hardware raids and cheap Rocs prior to anything else. That process is already underway.
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What drive setup would you in fact recommend over any of those Thunderbolt products? You mentioned a decent RAID box with Caviar Black drives so which enclosure? The Pegasus R4 4TB is $1099 and 4 Caviar Blacks would be 4 x $120 = $480 so the 4 bay enclosure would have to be $620 tops.
Good question. Right now I'm not so sure. Areca made some decent solutions, but they're quite expensive and I think their site is out of date. Some of those products seem to be discontinued. I would have to do some research, but it wouldn't be an impulse purchase tagged onto the purchase of a Mac. Promise actually makes a lot of stuff. They make enterprise grade storage products too, so this isn't outside their area of expertise. Reading some of the comments doesn't inspire confidence. I can't find any information on its RAID management software. RAID setups can be finicky, and I have no way of figuring out how theirs is configured. Here is an example. They offer an 18TB Raid 5 system. I don't know what kind of drives are used, so I have no idea if it addresses write hole issues. Judging by the price, I doubt they are using enterprise grade drives, which would be appropriate there. Keep in mind I never said the Pegasus was expensive. I just said I didn't like it. At that price range I would probably avoid Raid solutions if they aren't an absolute requirement. I abhor low end raid solutions.
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Do you have a 4k display that means you need 4k + data or is this one of those artificially high minimum requirements? If it supports your single imaginary 4k display on one port, you have the other port and USB 3 to use for data.
No I don't, but we're discussing future technology. I have mentioned that I wanted to see 10 bit displayport support. Displayport 1.2 is a requirement for that. I also wanted to know what it supports with a display in the chain. You're right that I would still have the other ports, but that doesn't mean much. When there is no way to expand the number of ports, you have to ensure you have a way to plug everything in, regardless of how many devices. That is why I'm interested in knowing what works per port. I'm skeptical of solutions that try to consolidate things to such a degree as I want to know exactly what works or doesn't work prior to supporting them.
Also seeing as this is future hardware, I would really like a 4k display. The displayport 1.2 standard has been out for some time. I see no reason to buy another machine that doesn't support it. I don't like huge displays. 24" at 16:10 is the perfect height for me as it's easy to scan quickly. It could go larger if it's a 16:9, and obviously I have to buy based on what is actually available. I hope they kick the dpi up a bit. Even with it further back, I can see the difference in resolution compared to some of the notebooks. Text is a prime example, but it shows to a lesser degree in other things.
Hey, is it true that you can't use three displays on the current crop of Mac Pro graphics cards unless BOTH of the Mini DispayPort ports have a POWERED adapter (meaning Apple's $100 dual-link DVI to MDP adapter)? Or how does that all work out?
Keep in mind I never said the Pegasus was expensive. I just said I didn't like it.
Wrong color? As you are aware, there aren't many alternatives so I don't see why you'd dislike it. Dick Applebaum on the forum bought a 12TB Pegasus drive (two in fact) and hasn't mentioned any problems with it.
No I don't, but we're discussing future technology. That is why I'm interested in knowing what works per port. I'm skeptical of solutions that try to consolidate things to such a degree as I want to know exactly what works or doesn't work prior to supporting them.
But you can say that about anything. You can say that you won't invest in PCIe because if NVidia makes a Tesla or Titan GPU, they might not develop a driver for the Mac so it's useless anyway.
On the one hand, you dismiss new technology because it might not last long enough yet on the other would say that Mac Pro buyers don't hold onto hardware more than 6 years anyway. If hardware doesn't need to last that long, there shouldn't be a problem.
If you need a machine with a RAID system, an iMac with Thunderbolt works today. If you need to run a 4k display in 3 years along with that RAID, upgrade the iMac. It's not really a big problem.
I'm thinking that Thunderbolt development is relatively expensive and third parties know that the move to optical is imminent.
This might not affect peripherals, but that's a big guess if you're throwing down millions on design and production.
They're probably just waiting for 2.0 to be sure.
That I can tell, optical TB makes no difference to the device, because that's only done inside the cable. It doesn't change the connector either. I think it's a pretty clever system.
Comments
Brilliant!
Marvin is a walking book of knowledge and very helpful all the time.
Even after he says Google is the source of his information? The web is an interesting way to get facts these days, something that didn't even exists in the sixties when I was going to school. Like a library it is a resource everybody should learn to leverage.
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Originally Posted by marvfox
Marvin is a walking book of knowledge and very helpful all the time.
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Originally Posted by Marvin
Accessible slots don't work so well for the Fusion drive setup though because if someone removes one drive, it would break it. Also, they obviously wanted 3.5" drives for the extra capacity and they are better being tightly secured to minimize noise. I'd be quite happy with an option where they put a blade SSD screwed in beside the RAM slots on the 27" and offered a 256GB and 512GB option on its own. There aren't really many competitively priced blade SSDs. There's a chance the SSD could get too hot that way but they can probably cool it down quite easily and it's a setup I'd prefer.
The problem there though is sustaining a large company. If you sell a product that will mean you saturate the market very quickly, the sales will start to tail off and you might have to downsize the company. There are two sides to the ethics of this because while technological progress means that consumers get better products at lower prices, it's harder for companies to sustain growth and jobs will be lost all the way from manufacuring to retail.
Given that fusion drives are a combination of two drives, you have a higher chance of failure. I wish they were serviceable. Beyond that it's not always a good idea to use disks up to the point where they stop working. It's possible for drives to become flaky prior to that, although I doubt most people recognize that.
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I think the way they do things now is the better way simply because the whole reason anybody really does anything is to try and improve the quality of life and having a sustainable economic model is more important to this than having technology that isn't really essential. There's a balance that has to be made so that we don't just have to put up with junk products as that affects growth too but it wouldn't be wise of them to give us everything all at once. I really wonder what's going to happen to the whole tech industry in another 20-30 years given how far it has come in that time. It seems very much like computers will go the way of televisions and it all just becomes about the services. No doubt that's why companies are making moves to develop their own OS as that's the only guaranteed point of leverage anyone will eventually have over profitable services.
I already view them as appliance like. All of the computer parts stores with the exception of Frys went out of business long ago.
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Right now, HDDs are around $0.05/GB and SSD is $0.60/GB. I can see all manufacturers just ditching HDDs and moving to faster, more profitable SSDs. There's not much point in having 200TB drives if it can still only read/write at 150MB/s and more importantly has really low random read/write speeds. SSD just needs to get down to $0.10/GB to replace any size of HDD because you can just stick more chips in. There's not the same weight and noise issues like with mechanical platters. Imagine in 2 years, they half SSD prices to get to $0.30/GB and another 2 years, it's $0.15/GB, you'd potentially get a 2TB 2.5" SSD for $300. Even if you can get a single 20TB HDD for the same price, people will still need RAID systems for reliability and if you have files that take up that much space, you need high performance.
NAND hasn't always been profitable while HDDs have been profitable. Here is a Forbes article on Western Digital if you don't believe me. Don't mistake higher pricing for extremely profitable. Now that is often how transitions happen. CRT to LCD happened due to profitability. It took years to get LCDs of reasonable quality for any kind of specialized use, even with significantly higher price points. Everyone complained about HDD pricing after the floods, yet the manufacturers did quite well in the aftermath.
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I doubt we'll ever see consumer HDDs that are 60TB+ in size because the market appeal for them would be so small. I can see them focusing on speed more than capacity to the point that RAM and storage are one and the same - in effect 2TB of storage becomes 2TB of RAM and video memory or at the very least is tiered storage with small amounts of very fast memory and of course all soldered to the motherboard. While it seems crazy now to solder storage to the motherboard, when computers are so inexpensive, it will be a better model to just replace the whole board. The iPad Mini is $329, which means the parts cost less than $200 and that includes the display. For any board or chip failure, they'd charge $100 for the whole part.
There are a few but you wouldn't say that there aren't as many consumer grade expressCard or PCIe cards as USB 3 products. The problem is that people class Thunderbolt as just a competitor to USB 3 and it's really missing the point of what Thunderbolt is. It's essentially a faster expressCard merged with the mini-displayport output.
I don't necessarily see this happening in the near future. It could happen eventually. If you look at computers, the functions they cover for the average individual are largely dependent on their capability. Computers were around at the time of VCRs, yet even if the footage was scanned and digitally graded, we didn't have consumer grade storage mediums appropriate for such use. I just used that because it's an easy example. Soldering parts doesn't always lower costs. Motherboard manufacturers were concerned about the BGA rumor from intel, as such changes could increase their costs. If intel was able to build the majority of the motherboard functions into the cpu package, that might be different.
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There's a premium for the faster ports and active cables. Lacie's drives come with a $50 premium. G-tech is a bit more with 4TB USB 3 at $399 and with Thunderbolt, $538. Thunderbolt needs more volume, cheaper parts and faster licensing steps but it takes time for this to happen. The problem as always lies with cheap product manufacturers that side with USB 3 because it's good enough but it will never negate the need for multi-protocol ports.
External hard drives tend to carry crappy margins. If you need a lot of them, it makes more sense to pick up a decent JBOD or Raid box. eSATA used to be the only somewhat cheap option with decent performance, but I welcome USB3 for a reason, as it's cuts out the use of third party HBAs that are not directly supported by Apple. When I dealt with those, I tried to at least use host cards and storage boxes that contained the same brand of hardware or at least the same chipset brand in each to minimize issues. Even then it's somewhat hit and miss finding this stuff on OSX. I wouldn't suggest many of them today simply because support seems to be dropping off. In spite of the issues with usb3, I would rather test something based on that. With thunderbolt I'm kind of waiting to see how it shakes out. Right now you have a maximum of two ports out, and effective daisy chaining seems limited to Apple's own peripheral devices. I figured they really only backed thunderbolt for those things and figured anything else was a bonus. It runs over a connector that they already used anyway. If you look at a 2010 macbook pro and a 2011, both have the mini displayport connector on the upper left by the ethernet port.
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It goes to 20Gbps per channel next year as they will use PCIe 3 lanes. Displayport 1.2 will be supported this year and is enough for 4k resolution.
A Thunderbolt cable wouldn't even plug into the display though so it's not even remotely a problem with Thunderbolt and I doubt it's a widespread issue. The laptops and Minis have HDMI for consumer displays.
Would you have hesitated to buy an eSATA drive? That standard is going to totally die out in favour of USB 3. At the end of the day, consumer electronics is like cars.You don't expect to have the same car for more than 10 years because you'd be able to afford a better one after that period of time. If a new storage standard comes along, you copy the data over to it and move on with your life.
I would hesitate to invest in hardware that requires eSATA today. If you need a few drives, that can be anywhere from a few hundred to a couple thousand or more depending on capacity and configuration. Mac options are a little limited today. I was going to say I would probably look at Areca, but their page is abit out of date. There isn't that much available in really good external storage today. LaCie and the others you regularly reference are popular because they're marketed well. They aren't that great. Try calling LaCie's sales or tech support to ask a simple product question. They never have an answer as they do little beyond marketing pretty things. There are a few raid and jbod boxes that have multiple io outputs such as esata/usb3/sas or thunderbolt. I haven't tested any of them. I dislike Apple's solution there. The store has too many listed complaints on it. I would rather pay for a decent raid box, populate it with drives that meet my needs (Caviar Black for most configurations or RE-4s for any parity based raid), and test it myself prior to placing it in service. Something pre-configured should show up and work near 100% of the time.
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You make out like Apple will get bored with Thunderbolt and just phase it out within 1-2 years. People said the same with displayport vs the much more widely adopted HDMI. They co-exist now just like TB and USB 3.
I would like to see how it catches on overall. Intel also hinted that it would come down to the amount of bandwidth people will pay for in the end. I may be more interested in its revision B, especially if it supports up to 4k as well as data.
Some of the facts you Google I found sometimes to be incorrect.
A fair amount of devces have two ports for daisy chaining, it's certainly not limited to Apple's devices. You've seen the demos.
A question like what - 'does it come in anything other than grey'? It's a hard drive, how complicated can it be? You plug it in; if it's broken, you send it back. The reviews for Lacie products don't seem to be all that bad:
http://store.apple.com/us/product/HA721ZM/A/lacie-1tb-sata-iii-ssd-thunderbolt-little-big-disk-hard-drive
http://store.apple.com/us/product/H7114ZM/A/lacie-little-big-disk-thunderbolt-series-hard-drive
and it's still only dozens of people out of many thousands of drives sold. Lacie also isn't the only TB manufacturer. If people mention Pegasus, the reaction is that people always mention Pegasus and they are too pricey; if it's Lacie, the support sucks; if it's anyone else there aren't enough choices for TB solutions.
There are hardly any HDD manufacturers left. They all merged into Seagate and WD and they both have Thunderbolt drives. In terms of TB drive bundle providers, there's Promise (Pegasus), Lacie, Seagate, WD, Elgato, G-Tech, Buffalo, Drobo. Who else needs to make a Thunderbolt hard drive?
What drive setup would you in fact recommend over any of those Thunderbolt products? You mentioned a decent RAID box with Caviar Black drives so which enclosure? The Pegasus R4 4TB is $1099 and 4 Caviar Blacks would be 4 x $120 = $480 so the 4 bay enclosure would have to be $620 tops.
Do you have a 4k display that means you need 4k + data or is this one of those artificially high minimum requirements? If it supports your single imaginary 4k display on one port, you have the other port and USB 3 to use for data.
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Originally Posted by Marvin
Accessible slots don't work so well for the Fusion drive setup though because if someone removes one drive, it would break it.
True. And this is the first time Apple's actually had a real, justifiable excuse for sealing the machine.
So you can expect them to double down on Fusion.
On another note, many people don't seem to realize that Apple has already cleared some headspace for the new Pro in the lineup.
There isn't an iMac configuration over 2K anymore.
The new Pro could start at $2049 (with no display), representing a $500. price drop, and still not hurt consumer sales of the iMac.
Not nearly enough. The fact that anyone has to read the specs of a device to verify it is pretty sad. It's not something I ever needed to think about with Firewire devices. It's like the USB mentality has infected the TB device world. The problem being, USB ports are plentiful, USB hubs are plentiful, it's hard to say that with TB.
And Apple sells those dongles. Fair enough, a second port is a bit much for those devices, but it shouldn't be a question for a larger device.
I don't consider LaCie because of support experiences I've heard from hmm and others around the net, and considerable issues with premature failures. A premium brand should have premium support.
http://www.buffalotech.com/products/portable-hard-drives/portable-hard-drives/ministation-thunderbolt
High up in this page:
Additionally, you can daisy-chain up to six Thunderbolt devices to maximize use of a single port†.
Fine print (way at the bottom of the page)
†MiniStation Thunderbolt does not have a Thunderbolt pass-through port so it must be the last device on a daisy-chain.
If Intel really does have stringent approval process, I don't understand why they let this product and Seagate's little TB sled go without a second port.
I think the top-end 27" was always $1999 but had BTO options to take it above, which are still there. If you configure it with the i7, it goes to $2200 and with the GTX 680M, it goes to $2350. I don't think it would affect iMac sales much if the next Pro started at $2k though because you still need a display and the minimum for an equivalent display would be $650. Apple would be making large enough margins on the Mac Pro sale anyway that they'd probably make more from the Pro sale than the iMac sale.
I have the same trouble trying to get the results I'm looking for. There are far too many spam results and the UI is not very good. For some reason Bing has copied it almost exactly and has worse results. I'd quite like to see a set of results like Apple's Top Sites view. A grid of 5 x 5 icons with just the domain name + text snippet and it would expand to the size of the browser window vertically with more items so I can page through results without scrolling down and be able to have file-based anonymous profiles so that the browser remembers different search preferences and there can be multiple profiles that can be removed, synced or deleted easily without needing any logins.
One of the most helpful Google options is the minus character where you just add something like -Samsung and it eliminates all the results you aren't interested in. You can also use things like filetype:pdf e.g ipad filetype:pdf if you want to find reference documents. Quotes helps for phrases. You can also search some of the known sites like anandtech with things like site:anandtech.com thunderbolt review -htc.
Yes, there really needs to be a Thunderbolt hub of some sort that gives you say 4 ports out of a single port. I'm not sure why nobody has built those yet. It would only need one controller for all the ports. Maybe Apple or even Intel can come up with one but it's needed for those situations where manufacturers don't put an extra port on. maybe they want to encourage people to put the extra port on their devices but they won't all do it.
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Originally Posted by Marvin
Yes, there really needs to be a Thunderbolt hub of some sort that gives you say 4 ports out of a single port. I'm not sure why nobody has built those yet. It would only need one controller for all the ports. Maybe Apple or even Intel can come up with one but it's needed for those situations where manufacturers don't put an extra port on. maybe they want to encourage people to put the extra port on their devices but they won't all do it.
I'm thinking that Thunderbolt development is relatively expensive and third parties know that the move to optical is imminent.
This might not affect peripherals, but that's a big guess if you're throwing down millions on design and production.
They're probably just waiting for 2.0 to be sure.
Originally Posted by Marvin
Yes, there really needs to be a Thunderbolt hub of some sort that gives you say 4 ports out of a single port. I'm not sure why nobody has built those yet.
What about the video requirements of such a device?
It should be able to work the same way as the Cinema displays, which can be chained together. If too many displays are attached, the remaining ones would just stay dark, which is what happens now. I'd expect the hub to support up to 2 displays on the current controllers and allow them to be connected to any hub port and in 2014, up to 4 displays.
Originally Posted by Marvin
It should be able to work the same way as the Cinema displays, which can be chained together. If too many displays are attached, the remaining ones would just stay dark, which is what happens now.
Ah, that was my only concern. I didn't think they'd let something like that happen, but since they already do…
Hey, is it true that you can't use three displays on the current crop of Mac Pro graphics cards unless BOTH of the Mini DispayPort ports have a POWERED adapter (meaning Apple's $100 dual-link DVI to MDP adapter)? Or how does that all work out?
This whole idea that Apple needs headspace is totally bogus. IMacs and Mac Pros sell into entirely different markets. Pricing of one has zero impact on the desirability of the other.
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Originally Posted by Frank777
True. And this is the first time Apple's actually had a real, justifiable excuse for sealing the machine.
So you can expect them to double down on Fusion.
On another note, many people don't seem to realize that Apple has already cleared some headspace for the new Pro in the lineup.
There isn't an iMac configuration over 2K anymore.
The new Pro could start at $2049 (with no display), representing a $500. price drop, and still not hurt consumer sales of the iMac.
It is a fantastic source for the technically inclined. I've been around long enough to know what it was like to get tech manuals, data sheets and other documentation before the Internet. This access really does level the playing field and means that any body any where on the planet can innovate if they so desire.
Now obviously Google isn't perfect. However neither are web sites maintained by the likes of Intel or TI. The alternative or rather the practice in the past though was terrible.
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Originally Posted by PhilBoogie
Only sometimes? I think the Internet is filled with garbage and google is the worst design for a search engi e. all based on who has the most hits, stemming from their PageRank system. I still have trouble finding what I'm looking for. And then needing to validate the info. Don't get me wrong, the Internet is a great resource ...
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Originally Posted by wizard69
This whole idea that Apple needs headspace is totally bogus. IMacs and Mac Pros sell into entirely different markets. Pricing of one has zero impact on the desirability of the other.
It may be bogus to you, but their past behavior suggests they may think this way. I think if they're going to retain a fairly high cost of entry, the hardware specs should justify at least justify the price.
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Originally Posted by Marvin
A fair amount of devces have two ports for daisy chaining, it's certainly not limited to Apple's devices. You've seen the demos.
A question like what - 'does it come in anything other than grey'? It's a hard drive, how complicated can it be? You plug it in; if it's broken, you send it back. The reviews for Lacie products don't seem to be all that bad:
http://store.apple.com/us/product/HA721ZM/A/lacie-1tb-sata-iii-ssd-thunderbolt-little-big-disk-hard-drive
http://store.apple.com/us/product/H7114ZM/A/lacie-little-big-disk-thunderbolt-series-hard-drive
and it's still only dozens of people out of many thousands of drives sold. Lacie also isn't the only TB manufacturer. If people mention Pegasus, the reaction is that people always mention Pegasus and they are too pricey; if it's Lacie, the support sucks; if it's anyone else there aren't enough choices for TB solutions.
My experience with Lacie is that they are not designed for heavy use. The usual complaint is a dead drive just outside of warranty. It's not always the drive itself. I saw this constantly with their older firewire drives. It was often a burnt firewire bridge (bridge, bridgeport, something like that, can't remember the exact part name). With single drive solutions you could always pry open the case and attempt to mount the bare drive in something else. That wouldn't work with the ones that used 2 drives in a Raid 0 internally.
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There are hardly any HDD manufacturers left. They all merged into Seagate and WD and they both have Thunderbolt drives. In terms of TB drive bundle providers, there's Promise (Pegasus), Lacie, Seagate, WD, Elgato, G-Tech, Buffalo, Drobo. Who else needs to make a Thunderbolt hard drive?
I didn't say many HDD manufacturers were left. Seagate and Western Digital are the only ones out of those that actually manufacture the hard drives themselves. They have both retained profitability. Seeing as you included companies that make external hard drives as opposed to the hard drives themselves, those guys still sell on relatively thin margins. To go to ssds, they would have to leverage performance. If it's just a backup solution, speed is a minor factor. I suspect they'll eat low end hardware raids and cheap Rocs prior to anything else. That process is already underway.
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What drive setup would you in fact recommend over any of those Thunderbolt products? You mentioned a decent RAID box with Caviar Black drives so which enclosure? The Pegasus R4 4TB is $1099 and 4 Caviar Blacks would be 4 x $120 = $480 so the 4 bay enclosure would have to be $620 tops.
Good question. Right now I'm not so sure. Areca made some decent solutions, but they're quite expensive and I think their site is out of date. Some of those products seem to be discontinued. I would have to do some research, but it wouldn't be an impulse purchase tagged onto the purchase of a Mac. Promise actually makes a lot of stuff. They make enterprise grade storage products too, so this isn't outside their area of expertise. Reading some of the comments doesn't inspire confidence. I can't find any information on its RAID management software. RAID setups can be finicky, and I have no way of figuring out how theirs is configured. Here is an example. They offer an 18TB Raid 5 system. I don't know what kind of drives are used, so I have no idea if it addresses write hole issues. Judging by the price, I doubt they are using enterprise grade drives, which would be appropriate there. Keep in mind I never said the Pegasus was expensive. I just said I didn't like it. At that price range I would probably avoid Raid solutions if they aren't an absolute requirement. I abhor low end raid solutions.
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Do you have a 4k display that means you need 4k + data or is this one of those artificially high minimum requirements? If it supports your single imaginary 4k display on one port, you have the other port and USB 3 to use for data.
No I don't, but we're discussing future technology. I have mentioned that I wanted to see 10 bit displayport support. Displayport 1.2 is a requirement for that. I also wanted to know what it supports with a display in the chain. You're right that I would still have the other ports, but that doesn't mean much. When there is no way to expand the number of ports, you have to ensure you have a way to plug everything in, regardless of how many devices. That is why I'm interested in knowing what works per port. I'm skeptical of solutions that try to consolidate things to such a degree as I want to know exactly what works or doesn't work prior to supporting them.
Also seeing as this is future hardware, I would really like a 4k display. The displayport 1.2 standard has been out for some time. I see no reason to buy another machine that doesn't support it. I don't like huge displays. 24" at 16:10 is the perfect height for me as it's easy to scan quickly. It could go larger if it's a 16:9, and obviously I have to buy based on what is actually available. I hope they kick the dpi up a bit. Even with it further back, I can see the difference in resolution compared to some of the notebooks. Text is a prime example, but it shows to a lesser degree in other things.
Yeah, Apple recommends the dual-link:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3477
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4279
It would be nice if more 3rd party displays supported displayport as you shouldn't need any adaptors.
They have a manual:
http://www.promise.com/media_bank/Download Bank/Utility/Pegasus User Manual (English)%20.pdf
Like the Caviar Black?
Wrong color? As you are aware, there aren't many alternatives so I don't see why you'd dislike it. Dick Applebaum on the forum bought a 12TB Pegasus drive (two in fact) and hasn't mentioned any problems with it.
But you can say that about anything. You can say that you won't invest in PCIe because if NVidia makes a Tesla or Titan GPU, they might not develop a driver for the Mac so it's useless anyway.
On the one hand, you dismiss new technology because it might not last long enough yet on the other would say that Mac Pro buyers don't hold onto hardware more than 6 years anyway. If hardware doesn't need to last that long, there shouldn't be a problem.
If you need a machine with a RAID system, an iMac with Thunderbolt works today. If you need to run a 4k display in 3 years along with that RAID, upgrade the iMac. It's not really a big problem.
That I can tell, optical TB makes no difference to the device, because that's only done inside the cable. It doesn't change the connector either. I think it's a pretty clever system.