Proprietary connector in Mac Pro?

lordsegan

Gawd
Joined
Jun 16, 2004
Messages
624
Does the new Mac Pro pcie flash drive use a proprietary connector? It looks similar to an M2/pcie connector... but I think it has two sets of data pins, not three...


lol?
 
i am soo disappointed with this "Mac Pro light"

You ask in a storage forum, so it does not matter if the slot allow 64GB or 900 GB
Apple has abandonded pro market, pro storage (ZFS), pro networking (10Gbe or FC) and pro computing at all.

This Mac Pro is not a Pro for Pro user but for wanabees who need a design object
where you can say, oh nice I like it and its a Mac too
 
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I don't understand why everyone's panties are in a bunch, Thunderbolt 2 is more than adequate to support external drives and arrays at faster than SAS speeds. What's the issue? Thunderbolt 2 to FC/10Gbe adapters are likely to ship at the same time, and if they don't you still have first gen Thunderbolt to 10Gbe and Thunderbolt to FC adapters if you want.
 
It remains to be seen if TB is sufficient. Do the 6 ports do 20gb total (likely)? If they do 40gb, then your gfx cards cut directly into that, when you use them. If you're going to run retna displays you'll be eating a lot of your 20gb bandwidth with that. If you want to capture 4k video, there goes a bunch more. I think it might be a mistake making everything go over a limited TB lane and trying to sell it as a pro. A pro might want to use 10gb ethernet, 2x retna displays, external storage, and encode/edit a video all over the TB... I think you might not have the bandwidth for that. I personally think going with zero expandability beyond TB is a mistake.

We shall see. It does look nice, which is all it will take to sell some of them.
 
It remains to be seen if TB is sufficient. Do the 6 ports do 20gb total (likely)? If they do 40gb, then your gfx cards cut directly into that, when you use them. If you're going to run retna displays you'll be eating a lot of your 20gb bandwidth with that. If you want to capture 4k video, there goes a bunch more. I think it might be a mistake making everything go over a limited TB lane and trying to sell it as a pro. A pro might want to use 10gb ethernet, 2x retna displays, external storage, and encode/edit a video all over the TB... I think you might not have the bandwidth for that. I personally think going with zero expandability beyond TB is a mistake.

We shall see. It does look nice, which is all it will take to sell some of them.
Their limited information say that it has up to 40GB/s PCIe 3.0 bandwidth which comes out to 40 lanes. That's the same number of lanes as the X79 chipset from 2011 (although that one is PCIe 2.0) so I'll believe the 40GB/s number.

Supposing each Thunderbolt 2 port gets 20Gb/s (note: bits vs the 40Gbytes/s mentioned above) instead of it being shared, that's 2.5GB/s per port * 6 = 15GB/s. They still have 25GB/s of bandwidth for the rest of the system even if all 6 Thunderbolt 2 ports are saturated.
 
Thunderbolt's bandwidth is probably sufficient. The problem for many is that if you want to be able to add storage or networking, you now have no choice but to have it external. That's not exactly a professional workstation, to my mind.
 
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