rob53

sflocal said:

rob53 said:

tmay said:

sflocal said:

bsbeamer said:

The price is decent and cable mechanism is unique and interesting, but this is not the "first" BYOD 40Gbps TB3 NVMe M.2 enclosure on the market.  Bring Your Own Drive solutions from Ineo, Trebleet, Avolusion, Shell Thunder, Yottamaster, Tekq, and others exist and have for months.

Yes, and those I have deemed as too unreliable, with quality issues, thermal issues, firmware issues, and sketchy compatibility issues with flavors of MacOS.  I’ve been wanting an external, portable TB drive but nothing on the market provided me with a comfortable feeling.

hope this one does.

So, I have a 2014 iMac with Fusion drive. and i'm wondering if it would make sense to use something like the linked device above as a boot drive. 

I have a 2015 iMac and it only has TB2 along with a Fusion drive. 

From MacSales: Besides being the industry’s first Thunderbolt™ 3 bus powered (no power adapter required) enclosure... 1553MB/s performance based on testing a 2.0TB OWC Aura Pro P12 equipped Envoy Express

I'm not sure if the Apple TB2 to TB3 adapter works as a powered port. I have the adapter but it's connected to a TB3 RAID, which is powered.

The SSD blade used in the photo doesn't match the photos used by MacSales for either their 6G or NVMe blades so I'm not sure which blade they're actually using. The NVMe blade, https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/S3DN3P2T20/, is rated at 3400/3000MB/s so this enclosure doesn't use the full speed interface like their Envoy Pro EX which has 2500MB/s speeds. The 1500 is nothing to complain about but you might not get that speed using TB2. I presume the internal port is a USB-C, which your iMac doesn't have.

Even though I only have a TB2 iMac I'm going to go ahead and get the enclosure and check it's speed when connected to my TB3 RAID (connected to my iMac using Apple's adapter). Pricing for their Envoy Pro EX, 2TB model is $499.75 while their 2TB NVMe card is $348.99, add the $68 for the enclosure and it's $416.99, a good savings but it is slower than the Pro E, which doesn't work with the Apple adapter (confirmed by MacSales).

Ordered: expected delivery August 2020

Thunderbolt2's 20gb/s bandwidth = 2.5GB/s.  TB3's 40gb/s = 5GB/s.  Granted, OWC's 1.5GB/s is still extremely fast for an external drive, I wonder if the bottleneck is the SSD drive itself, and not the enclosure.  The Samsung 970 Evo is rated at 3.5GB/s read and 2.5GB/s write.  Will this enclosure not utilize that speed if I use that SSD?  I hate these kind of uncertainties.

I'm curing about your setup.  Your 2015 iMac has a TB2 interface, yet you're using a TB3 RAID array?  What adapter are you using?  Apple's adapter allows TB2 devices (like the Thunderbolt monitors I use) to connect to a TB3 system.  Not the other other way around like yours.  Can you explain your method?  I'm been looking for such a solution.

See response from @Aderutter above (edited after your response came before mine). The Apple TB 2-3 is bidirectional. I bout MacSales Thunderbay mini with four HDD to use for backup. I got the TB3 version since it was on sale and will work on newer computers. The HDDs are worthless because I can't do RAID with APFS, at least not until macOS 10.16 or 11. These devices use SoftRAID, which is now owned by MacSales. Remember this RAID software from years ago? It's still around. I shouldn't have been cheap, purchasing OWC's 6G SSD which can use RAID 4 supposedly with APFS but can't confirm this. Problem is, what I have is an almost unusable RAID except for its powered TB3 ports. Live and learn. OWC's NVMe blades are actually less expensive than their older 6G SSD drives but the NVMe blades do require a proper enclosure. I haven't found an empty enclosure but they contain four slots, which can be managed by SoftRAID. Since this is an OWC/MacSales article, I'll reference one product and price. 4TB ThunderBlade, powered enclosure, https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB3TBV4T04/ Stripe two or more blades and you can achieve the maximum speed of the NVMe blades. Look at the Compatibility tab and it lists iMacs back into 2014 when using the Apple TB2 to TB3 adapter. This would be a really nice 4TB drive but it can't serve as the boot disk unless you leave one blade out of the RAID, striping the other three. You should be able to boot off the single blade, making for a very fast, 1TB, boot drive on older TB2 Macs while being instantly usable on TB3 Macs. 

I'm also considering opening up my Fusion iMac and replacing the blade with a 1TB official Apple blade (I found an Apple certified repair source in CA for used ones), removing my HDD or replacing it with a 6G SSD for iTunes storage. Now that Apple has announced the AS Mac (what about ASM or ASMac as the acronym, maybe ASiM) I'll wait but upgrading my 2015 iMac would make it usable for many people for at least a few more years. 

tmay said:

sflocal said:

bsbeamer said:

The price is decent and cable mechanism is unique and interesting, but this is not the "first" BYOD 40Gbps TB3 NVMe M.2 enclosure on the market.  Bring Your Own Drive solutions from Ineo, Trebleet, Avolusion, Shell Thunder, Yottamaster, Tekq, and others exist and have for months.

Yes, and those I have deemed as too unreliable, with quality issues, thermal issues, firmware issues, and sketchy compatibility issues with flavors of MacOS.  I’ve been wanting an external, portable TB drive but nothing on the market provided me with a comfortable feeling.

hope this one does.

So, I have a 2014 iMac with Fusion drive. and i'm wondering if it would make sense to use something like the linked device above as a boot drive. 

I have a 2015 iMac and it only has TB2 along with a Fusion drive. 

From MacSales: Besides being the industry’s first Thunderbolt™ 3 bus powered (no power adapter required) enclosure... 1553MB/s performance based on testing a 2.0TB OWC Aura Pro P12 equipped Envoy Express

I'm not sure if the Apple TB2 to TB3 adapter works as a powered port. I have the adapter but it's connected to a TB3 RAID, which is powered.

The SSD blade used in the photo doesn't match the photos used by MacSales for either their 6G or NVMe blades so I'm not sure which blade they're actually using. The NVMe blade, https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/S3DN3P2T20/, is rated at 3400/3000MB/s so this enclosure doesn't use the full speed interface like their Envoy Pro EX which has 2500MB/s speeds. The 1500 is nothing to complain about but you might not get that speed using TB2. I presume the internal port is a USB-C, which your iMac doesn't have.

Even though I only have a TB2 iMac I'm going to go ahead and get the enclosure and check it's speed when connected to my TB3 RAID (connected to my iMac using Apple's adapter). Pricing for their Envoy Pro EX, 2TB model is $499.75 while their 2TB NVMe card is $348.99, add the $68 for the enclosure and it's $416.99, a good savings but it is slower than the Pro E, which doesn't work with the Apple adapter (confirmed by MacSales).

Ordered: expected delivery August 2020

After watching the WWDC video "Explore the New System Architecture of Apple Silicon Macs" I'm beginning to understand just how powerful the A-series SOCs really are and how the will change the way Macs work in the future. The graphic showing multiple components in an Intel-based Mac while everything is on a SOC (not sure about all RAM) demonstrates how the AS SOC can run faster and more efficiently than the Intel configuration. Graphic is over-simplistic but AS SOC uses the same memory for both the CPU and GPU. No more having to worry about specifying a GPU with more memory since its able to use as much shared-memory as it needs. The video didn't mention PCIe memory in regards to the AS drawing, it uses whatever internal memory bus the SOC has. I don't know how the SOC will connect to external devices like SSDs, (probably?) RAM, and all I/Os but the more information that comes out about the AS Mac the more it looks like it's going to be much more powerful than Intel Macs.

As for discrete GPUs with their huge heatsinks, I wonder how many GPUs Apple will be able to add to their SOC and whether they will create specialized GPU-only "SOCs" that work with the main CPU SOC over some kind of ultra fast bus. When I look at a traditional slot-mounted GPU, I see a reasonable size GPU chip with a lot of other electronic components all hidden by a heatsink the size of a Mac mini (just joking but not by much). I'm sure the GPU manufacturer is overclocking the GPU, creating enough heat to heat a small house and definitely your office. Will Apple be able to create a GPU with the same number of cores as something like the high end Nvidia TITAN RTX with 4608:288:96:576:72 (72) (6) cores (That's Main Shader Processors : Texture Mapping Units : Render Output Units : Tensor Cores (or FP16 Cores in GeForce 16 series) : Ray-tracing Cores (Streaming Multiprocessors) (Graphics Processing Clusters)) without needing a refrigerator to cool it?

cpsro said:

Thunderbolt 4 would be nice

Just checked and it looks like TB4 might be the same speed as TB3 (40Gbps) but with possible other features. (ref: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15345/intel-teases-thunderbolt-4-light-on-details) This could change but I have to wonder whether anything faster is actually beneficial until peripherals get faster. PCIe 4 and the latest NVMe drives can reach a speed of 5000MB/s compared to 3500MB/s for PCIe 3 drives. Both of these are lightning fast, much faster than what most users are used to. No RAID is capable of matching these speeds using HDD and the PCIe bus isn't capable of providing anything faster unless you try using RAID over multiple PCIe busses. Not sure that would even help. I'm comfortable with TB3 in USB 4 at least until there's a general use for something faster. 

melgross said:

rob53 said:

melgross said:

swineone said:

"This works with any Intel Mac app" [quoted from the article, regarding Rosetta 2]

Are you sure? Does that include Parallels running x86-64 Windows? It's quite telling that they mentioned Rosetta and virtualization, yet made no mention of this, which could alleviate concerns on many pro users' minds (myself included).

I doubt they meant that. But as Apple has said, only 2% of Macs coming in for service had Windows installed in Bootcamp. How many are using Parallels or other virtualization software with Windows, I don’t know, but it’s not a lot. I have it too, but I haven’t run Windows for more than a year. I still do Run Linux occasionally though. So likely, from what I hear, that’s more important.

i doubt I’d too many pro users use Windows on their Mac these days. It’s mostly used by gamers.

I went back through the Keynote and at the 1:40:11 mark, Docker (docker.com) was shown running Linux. At the 1:41:58 mark Parallels was shown running Debian. Craig said all macOS Big Sur demoes were run on an AS Mac so I assume it's either the AS Mac mini or another development AS Mac. Parallels has made some big changes in ver 15 but I run VMWare Fusion so haven't looked at Parallels for a long time. Anyway, at this point in the keynote they were talking about Rosetta 2 so I assume they simply installed Parallels ver 15 and it converted it to run on Apple Silicon. They didn't show Windows running but that's really Parallels and Dockers responsibility to provide the hardware interface between Windows and the host platform. It appears this is working but as everyone (else) wants to know, will it run Windows. We'll have to wait for the first developer to try it on the developer kit.

One other thing. I checked the serial number of the AS Mac mini in the keynote and it says "We’re sorry, but this serial number isn’t valid. Please check your information and try again." I don't remember if this was simply a faked screen shot or if Craig did an About this Mac and it showed up. Apple could also be blocking certain serial numbers.

Parallels doesn’t present any “hardware” interface. All they do is to allow An OS to run in their virtualized environment. But that an x86 environment. Of course, Microsoft has Windows for ARM. But that also a native ARM implementation, which requires developers to redo their software for ARM. So it’s not “really” Windows. If parallels could run windows, even poorly right now, I think Apple would have mentioned that it was being worked on. If Microsoft was working to get it working natively on the new Macs, then it would have been mentioned. It’s too obvious a feature to just ignore.

Check out, https://www.parallels.com/blogs/apple-silicon-wwdc/ Of course the canned answer about Windows support is check the blog, which doesn't have anything new but it's still early. The FACT they worked with Apple on providing a special version of Parallels running on AS Mac means it wasn't simply started using Rosetta 2.

"Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) revealed many innovative developments, including a demo featuring a prototype of a forthcoming version of Parallels Desktop for Mac running on Mac with Apple Silicon."