Slashdot Mirror

[1]: Yes, people will say that "real men use a NAS". As of today, Macs can't do iSCSI. Macs can't do 10GigE. Macs can't do FC. The fastest I/O you are going to get is from the Apple-only M.2 wannabee SSD. Even a Thunderbolt drive barely performs better than a USB 3.0 drive.

1. GlobalSAN iSCSI Initiator allows iSCSI Targets. Or if you like F/OSS Solutions, iSCSIIntiator does it, too.

2. Sonnet has a TWIN 10GigE to Thunderbolt adapter. Pricey, yes; but I think that might be the case with 10GigE overall. And you didn't say "cheaply"...

3. Several companies, including Atto, have both Thunderbolt to FC (as well as TB to 10GigE) adapters. Promise has a TB to TWIN 16 Gig FC adapter, too.

Sure, some of these interfaces cost as much as a cheap used-car; but OTOH, the people that need this stuff are generally not just surfing the web and posting stuff on Facebook. And again, you stated flatly that it couldn't be done; NOT that it couldn't be done on a "beer" budget.

So you see, Apple's decision to throw their design-decisions behind Thunderbolt is (finally) beginning to pay-off. They simply don't have to have a pile of dedicated connectors (not to mention the hardware to support them) for them to be able to offer (mostly through 3rd party vendors) these relatively exotic interfaces, for those who need them.

Did they go too far with the new MacBook's "one connector to rule them all" approach? Hell, yeah! But, all-in-all, Apple has made a very wise decision with ThunderBolt, and the proof is that other computer manufacturers are (finally!) beginning to agree.

Say, RAID-6? That's what you do for drive failures. The problem with drive failure isn't replacing the drive, but the data and the downtime.

With most workstations, this is easy, you can get a RAID controller, usually integrated on the board (Dell's PERC 710s are great) and you can knock in a bunch of drives and go. High performance, high resilience. No such luck on this new Pro.

Another option would be a good external system. Maybe a heavy hitting iSCSI or FC array. That's where you go for really high end, lots of storage, reliability, etc. Ahh well you are kinda screwed there too. No cards to add FC to the pro, and OS-X has no iSCSI initiator, which is shocking for a modern OS, Windows got it in 2003 and Linux in 2005.

Also you might want to look in to SSD failure rates. They aren't particularly high, but they aren't particularly low either. Oh, and they are workload dependent as well. I loves me some SSDs, but don't think they are rocks on which you can build your house.

Your analysis misses a few important implementation details.

First, at least one company (ATTO) already makes thunderbolt adapters for 10GbE and FC. ATTO and SNS makes iSCSI initiators for OSX. I've used both. They work fine. But iSCSI on Mac rarely makes sense.

Second, the typical usecase for these is for a video editor. Few use iSCSI, and the better funded ones will be connecting to a nice SAN or NAS over 10 GbE.

Third, who cares? The SSD fails, you get it replaced. These are workstations, not servers, and any important data should be going to a more redundant system.

Show me a laptop with SCSI, fibre channel or 10GBe please.

Well there if you have Thunderbolt, you can do 10GBASE-T:
ThunderLink NT 1102 (10GBASE-T) 10Gb/s Thunderbolt (2-port) to 10GbE (2-Port).

I'm a SW engineer at ATTO Technology, and one of the products here is a RAID-capable disk array. I truthfully don't know all that much about its behind-the-scenes workings as I am on a different project. The Diamond is capable of holding 24 ATA disks for a total of 7.2 TB for less than $10/GB. It does Fibre Channel or SCSI, and it can emulate a tape drive to be used with your favorite backup software.

Here's the link for more info:
Diamond Storage Array

Avid's Nitris hardware requires PCI-X, as will pretty much any uncompressed HD NLE solution.

Atto's UL320 is a good example of the kind of scsi adapter you'll need if you want to write that uncompressed HD video out to disk.

While the Avid HW, is fairly esoteric, the SCSI adapter is pretty mainstream. I'd choose it for driving a home media server for instance.

The company I work for has been doing this for a few years already... ATTO Technologies, Inc.

I'll be damned if I can find anything at ATTO's website, but they used to make the SiliconDisk II, essentially a SCSI hard drive made completely of DRAM (yes, it has power outage protection).