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Spiritgreywolf

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 12, 2008
42
0
Question for the gang here.

With the new iMac 27", is it possible to slave 2 Thunderbolt displays (one to the left, one to the right), and also connect a thunderbolt Pegasus or similar RAID array?

I do a lot of work with VMWare Fusion for various hospitals - usually multiple clients who've given me their approved, encrypted laptops whereby I summarily snarfed them into Fusion and handed them back their door-stop Dell's and other laptops.

So far, I've been using (mainly) a MacBook Pro where I put in 16GB of RAM, and replaced the HD with an SSD and the DVD with an SSD internally as well, and slaved off a thunderbolt 27" display.

The performance I get from running multiple Windows 7 development desktops concurrently where the boot drive is one SSD, and the VM's are another in this configuration is wicked-fast - even compared to a single desktop running a single instance of Windows in most cases.

But what I would like to do now is an iMac with 32GB RAM, 3TB Fusion drive and a Pegasus array holding the VM's. I've read that the Pegasus running my VM's would actually be faster than the internal SSD (which I find hard to comprehend - but okay) - I'm just not sure if I can not only slave 2 displays and a storage array - but do it without incurring a ton of speed loss over the thunderbolt channels.

Ideas? Is it possible? Heck, I wouldn't mind waiting for the Pro maybe, not sure if that would be even faster/better - but am curious about this.

Thanks!

Ryan
 

thaboz

macrumors newbie
Sep 6, 2008
17
0
Hi Spiritgreywolf,

Yes you can have dual ThunderBolt displays and multiple ThunderBolt devices connected to it. Apple just released the upgraded version of the iMac yesterday.
This version comes with faster processor and better graphics, depending on your work you can upgrade the graphics card (build to order) to gain more performance. The new 27" iMac has 2 ThunderBolt ports like the older version, it looks like they still use ThunderBolt 1 and not ThunderBolt 2 which has twice the bandwidth (10Gb/sec. vs. 20Gb/sec.). The ThunderBolt Displays have got a ThunderBolt port on the back of the screen, so you can hook up the drive to the display. With 2 ThunderBolt Displays (one left of the iMac and one the right) you still have 2 ThunderBolt ports free for the Promise Pegasus RAID and other ThunderBolt solutions.

Kind regards,

Thabo
 
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