Thunderbolt / Enclosure

[sfx2000]

They tend to drag their feet or use an in house connector to make it feel special. Well, that's out the door with the statement above.

I don't think Apple likes it one single bit - they've made a metric fark-tonne of money on the MFI (Made for iPhone) based on those Lightning and 30-pin connectors... with USB-C connectivity, that changes

Much like the App Store - EU regs are pushing hard on that as well, making Apple allow 3rd party app stores (actually, they've done this already with Corp App Stores, but nobody mentions that in the blog threads)...

And I agree - USB-C ports haven't really met the expectations that it would be the one ring that binds everything together - that's still a ways away - it's been a better part of at least 11 years now that it's been around...

As you mention - due diligence counts - but that assumes that the person plugging stuff in has done that... that's not how it was supposed to work.

 

[sfx2000]

Suppose the same goes for 802.11BE coming soon to double WIFI speeds on 6ghz.

Marketing is setting bad expectations there - just saying...

Shannon Limits still apply - laws of physics don't change just because it's on a spec sheet.

 

[avtella]

In regards to SSDs yes Samsung’s qualitative dominance has nearly disappeared. WDs biggest issues especially with the SN750 was the awful idle power draw (important in mobile use) as it couldn’t get down to low sleep states and performance as the drive filled, one area where Samsung controllers used to be superior to the competition. The SN850/850X seem to have fixed those lingering issues, it’s only real weakness being extremely high idle to wake latency but probably not noticeable in real world use. Samsungs pricing also has come down due the competition these days, the 990 2TB in some places is not more than $10-15 over the WDSN850X.

Samsung and WD are probably still better buys than some of the lower priced competitors in regards to dealing with sudden power loss. I thought Hynix was a good contender till I saw this article below last year, hence why I stuck to Samsung, not sure if they improved on power loss protection in the P41. Granted only a few drives were tested at the time, goes to show there’s more than just sequential read/write speeds that matter. Important stuff like 4K random reads writes , dynamic pSLC cache sizes, sustained write speeds post pSLC are usually missed in lot of the superficial reviews, which do empty drive tests.

Heads-Up: Some NVMe SSDs Could Lose Your Data If The Power Suddenly Goes Out

oday's drives have protections in place to prevent data loss during a sudden power outage, but they may not always work.

amp.hothardware.com

 

[Tech Junky]

@avtella

I was a bit surprised the 770 beat the 850 in the enclosure though figuring the dram would have better results with the 850. I don't mind the savings though between the two if the cheaper one performs better in the enclosure. At the time it was at least $50 cheaper for the 770. Drives do funny things under different scenarios and hardware. Just like your firmware and SS drives.

 

[avtella]

My first SSDs were actually Crucial/Micron MX100s excellent for their time and still running. I remember part of the advertisement for it was power loss protection. (I believe these actually had capacitors.) I assumed techniques like journaling (firmware level) would be more common in modern consumer SSDs as PLP caps are still mostly an enterprise thing.

 

[Tech Junky]

journaling

Linux does it and windows well....

 

[sfx2000]

Another view...

Seems that TB4/USB4 and peripherals along with controllers are still be sorted a bit

 

[thecheapseats]

good info on TB chipsets for external case and power supplies for tb3 (and now tb4)... thanks...

I 've been dealing with TB since version 1 (10+ years now) for hackintosh-specific hardware devices/applications, and things had never been easy... however once you surrender to 'not' trying to save money on cables and just suck-up that expense - it got easier... the performance - once 'tb' was dialed in - has always been stellar for both storage and peripherals...

by comparison, anything-usb was just dismal nonsense for my uses...

dialing-in tb1-4 wasn't as insane as (forty year old) scsi once was long ago - but close... mostly because of limited tech info due to the small market penetration of tb...

moving now from tb3 to tb4 and cpu-hardware that isn't soon-to-be dead-hackintosh centric (as apple changes processor brands, yet again)... all the intel-hack builds were a good run however - with much more performance at less than half the price (or more) of top-line mac pro towers...

 

[Tech Junky]

@thecheapseats

TB penetration was limited outside of Apple users because Intel made it so. I always kept an eye on TB though until USB started pushing out 5/10/40gbs options to compete at a much lower price point. Intel based Mac's though should be able to pop in a TB4 card and work just as well. I mean $60 for 2 ports + 100W PD through a SATA power cable isn't too hard to stomach,. Then again this applies to certain boards that have the 5-pin header for TB to work. There are other cards though that have different pin outs / connectors like the Asus one that IIRC has a 14 pin cable / header that combines the 2-3 different connectors into s single cable.

I won't get into the whole ide / pata / sata / scsi debate though.

For peripherals outside of data though I haven't tested as I don't have the need or products that could use the option. The biggest benefit is opening it up to systems outside of Apple's control and hefty price tags. I have a feeling it will get interesting with the TB5 release and with Apple and everyone else releasing their own CPU's it wouldn't surprise me if they come up with proprietary methods of moving signals. They have to come up with something to use USB-C connectors that scrambles the data to lock you into their ecosystem,

 

[thecheapseats]

@thecheapseats

TB penetration was limited outside of Apple users because Intel made it so. I always kept an eye on TB though until USB started pushing out 5/10/40gbs options to compete at a much lower price point. Intel based Mac's though should be able to pop in a TB4 card and work just as well. I mean $60 for 2 ports + 100W PD through a SATA power cable isn't too hard to stomach,. Then again this applies to certain boards that have the 5-pin header for TB to work. There are other cards though that have different pin outs / connectors like the Asus one that IIRC has a 14 pin cable / header that combines the 2-3 different connectors into s single cable.

I won't get into the whole ide / pata / sata / scsi debate though.

For peripherals outside of data though I haven't tested as I don't have the need or products that could use the option. The biggest benefit is opening it up to systems outside of Apple's control and hefty price tags. I have a feeling it will get interesting with the TB5 release and with Apple and everyone else releasing their own CPU's it wouldn't surprise me if they come up with proprietary methods of moving signals. They have to come up with something to use USB-C connectors that scrambles the data to lock you into their ecosystem,

I have yet to see a generic add-in TB 3/4 pci card (which is absurd) and any add-in card has always been motherboard mfg specific excluding real apple comps - and always hard to acquire... the peripherals I use are far more costly than any computer I might want to interface with - therefore TB is just a minor cost necessity... apple's eco-system practices are sadly predatory - but fortunately TB is (now) wholly controlled by Intel...

 

[Tech Junky]

Well, I have an ASRock board and a Gigabyte card. The problem I ran into is there's only 3 aic's on the market and ASRock is one of them but, it didn't have the PD that went to 100w by connecting the supplemental power cable.

 

[sfx2000]

I have yet to see a generic add-in TB 3/4 pci card (which is absurd) and any add-in card has always been motherboard mfg specific excluding real apple comps - and always hard to acquire... the peripherals I use are far more costly than any computer I might want to interface with - therefore TB is just a minor cost necessity... apple's eco-system practices are sadly predatory - but fortunately TB is (now) wholly controlled by Intel...

AIB's on the Mac side of the house are limited -reasonable as it's a small market, with OG Mac Pro's (pre-trashcan) as the major market for them, along with Hackintosh's... with a primary focus on storage support, as these older machines were limited to SATA onboard, and AIB's for RAID over SATA/SAS otherwise.

Newer Tech and Sonnet have TB3 cards, and I saw a couple with USB3.2 support...

Which is good enough for these older machines...

As I may have mentioned early, TB4 on Mac adds some additional display support, along with Thunderbolt Hub capability to daisy-chain devices.

Apple Silicon vs. Intel based handle things a bit different, key thing is Apple Silicon is TB4, Intel Macs are TB3...

 

[sfx2000]

For peripherals outside of data though I haven't tested as I don't have the need or products that could use the option. The biggest benefit is opening it up to systems outside of Apple's control and hefty price tags.

Up until TB4 - it wasn't the Apple Tax - it was Intel and their licensing fees - and if a peripheral vendor used Intel silicon, the license was bundled into the chipset.

Business logic then, not technical, is what drove the pricing for TB peripherals - high costs up front to implement, and small market as it was very Apple centric - and USB3 was "good enough" for most folks not in the Apple ecosystem.

TB4, I agree, has opened things up, and getting USB and the TB camps on the same page, well, heck, everyone wins there...

 

[Tech Junky]

TB4, I agree, has opened things up, and getting USB and the TB camps on the same page, well, heck, everyone wins there...

USB is still working up the courage to level things out though. They sidestepped things a bit and thew in a wrench with 20gbps 2x2 that really hasn't taken off. It was a nice idea until the licensing was unlocked / royalty free. It's been a strange road to redemption and Intel probably figured out they can sell more controllers w/o the hoops for products. Just bake the cost into the controllers instead. And AMD now can use the came controllers which wasn't really possible before TB/USB 4.

Of course w/ USB they want everything to be backwards compatible and this happens with other tech as well but, it's cumbersome and slows down progress. You're starting to see it more with MOBO's as well with I/AMD changing the socket every 2-3 iterations to make sure they don't stumble into legacy conflicts or have to deal with it on future CPUs. Personally I'd like to see no USB-A ports at this point so we can ween off the population from stuffing 10 of those on a board and depleting lanes that could be used for other things. Also, getting rid of the other funky connectors would simplify life as well. There's no reason for keeping B / micro / miini. A C port can handle everything those uses were for as I've been using adapters for awhile now to trim the number of cables I need to keep on hand. I have a couple of premium 20gbps USB-C cables and a couple of 40gbps C cables and call it a day with a handful of adapters for misc devices.

Lie you said before "I should be able to just plug it in and it should work" well, the protocols negotiating the connection handle it well enough from data or power at this point. Another wrench will be PD 3.1 pushing power to 140W+ which means better cables are needed and those should also be able to handle 40/80gbps data unless they cheap out on the chips in the connectors or just 2-wire them for power only. I like the ide of bumping the power up and being able to fully power any laptop that sits under the threshold of the adapter being used. For me my system needs 180W at full tilt but, I can get away with charge/use ~60W easily. It's been a bit of a game finding power supplies hitting the right mix of V/A to satisfy all devices. The biggest problem child was the 6G gateway needing a 15V/3A to power up even though it only needs 5W of power once powered up. I had some 100W options sitting around and none of them had the 15V option on them so, of course it didn't boot up. I ended up having to put a power meter on it to figure out what it was requesting / using and that made it easy to get a supply that hit the mark.

It doesn't really matter though as the target is always moving when it comes to data / power at this point. Just when the dust settles there's the new generation of HW coming out to challenge the ecosystem yet again.

 

[sfx2000]

t doesn't really matter though as the target is always moving when it comes to data / power at this point. Just when the dust settles there's the new generation of HW coming out to challenge the ecosystem yet again.

Yes, agreed...

BTW - since you have two TB4 endpoints - have you looked at networking them - on Mac this is pretty straight forward, so 10Gb links are trivial point to point... it's ethernet without the ethernet card

Anyways - TB was always considered an evolution of Firewire - isosynchronous, and that was a lot of Apple's contribution to that spec... and to the markets they serve.

USB4 is an evolution of that ecosystem outside of Apple - even though Apple was a leader in getting USB into the general PC ecosystem - before the we had a wide variety of connectivity options - OS2 inputs for keyboard/mouse, RS232 comms ports and IEEE 1284 parallel ports for printers and other things - and yes, SCSI, because high performance disks had to do SCSI of some form/function there - and SCSI could also be your scanner for better or worse - "how well is your bus terminated"

I think where we are at the moment in June of 2023 - it's a better place with things - always opportunity for improvement that being said...

 

[Tech Junky]

networking them

IIRC I played around with it trying to use a direct cable but, since they're 3ft long it's a bit awkward to say the least.

I think where we are at the moment in June of 2023 - it's a better place with things

For the most part. It all comes back to how deep you dig or care about tech though. For the novice using a chrome pad probably don't care. Those of us on boards like this and other places dig a bit deeper. Then there's those of us that rip things apart looking to make them better.

 

[thecheapseats]

AIB's on the Mac side of the house are limited -reasonable as it's a small market, with OG Mac Pro's (pre-trashcan) as the major market for them, along with Hackintosh's... with a primary focus on storage support, as these older machines were limited to SATA onboard, and AIB's for RAID over SATA/SAS otherwise.

Newer Tech and Sonnet have TB3 cards, and I saw a couple with USB3.2 support...

Which is good enough for these older machines...

As I may have mentioned early, TB4 on Mac adds some additional display support, along with Thunderbolt Hub capability to daisy-chain devices.

Apple Silicon vs. Intel based handle things a bit different, key thing is Apple Silicon is TB4, Intel Macs are TB3...

tried two Sonnett solutions on the last pair of hackintoshs I built - a mac-centric TB card was a no-go on them, but their 10g ethernet-to-TB is/was fine... unfortunately for me, their new 25g-sfp SAN pairs aren't hackintosh-happening, therefore it's time to bail on hackintosh for a TB4 full intel windoze migration... I'm going to miss those half dozen hackintoshes...

have a nuc13 i9 extreme with a pci 16 slot and TB4 getting delivered tomorrow for a proof of concept SAN hub... i'll see how that goes with the 25g-sfp twin cards... will have to bite the bullet with a win/intel build for the other obscure hardware devices... damn computers...

 

[Tech Junky]

@thecheapseats

If speed is the goal there are 100ge nic available but then the bottleneck is likely the drives.

https://a.co/d/eRhWM5c

https://a.co/d/aSPxqno

Cards are pricey but the cables are cheap for dac unless you go with transceivers and your own fiber of any length.

 

[thecheapseats]

@thecheapseats

If speed is the goal there are 100ge nic available but then the bottleneck is likely the drives.

https://a.co/d/eRhWM5c

https://a.co/d/aSPxqno

Cards are pricey but the cables are cheap for dac unless you go with transceivers and your own fiber of any length.

25g will work for now - until it doesn't...

the bottleneck obstacles @25G and greater (to 100G) are those fast-nic implementations (like you linked) with questionable heritage - been there done that - a waste of time/fail - with low-end workstation machines' inability (in most cases) to even support "known-authentic" enterprise class nic cards - while running my vertical software apps (that don't virt) with i/o hardware that eats storage and cpu-proc bandwidth...

hell, if the narrow vertical software I have to use would/could run/scale to dual XEONs or amd EPYCs on a supermicro *nix box - I'd just do that - but it doesn't... therefore I'm left with a lousy (i.e. expensive) edge-case with sas/san + u2/u3/nvme blade servers for real-time DAS i/o...

not even going to talk about the (simple&cheap by comparison) 2x48 3.5" rust disk enclosures (plus spares) for cold-storage...

 

[sfx2000]

Interesting take on TB3 vs TB4 from SonnetTech - they make a couple of good points regarding TB4 and PCI-e links downstream...