Ok I'm confused. I'm about to upgrade to the 8 core Westmere and reading on the possibility of getting a PCIe USB 3 card as a work around for the current Mac Pro's is great! Yet now apparently Sandybridge will have it built in? And Sandybridge is the next Xeon chip up from Westmere or am I confused? If so, when is Sandybridge slated for the Macs?
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Anyone plan on getting the Caldigit USB3.0 drive/PCIe card?
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Ok I'm confused. I'm about to upgrade to the 8 core Westmere and reading on the possibility of getting a PCIe USB 3 card as a work around for the current Mac Pro's is great! Yet now apparently Sandybridge will have it built in? And Sandybridge is the next Xeon chip up from Westmere or am I confused? If so, when is Sandybridge slated for the Macs?
yes owc has a qx2 and a card i will find links
4 bay enclosure
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MEQX2KIT0GB/
a card that allows 2 qx2 enclosures
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/MXPCIE6GRS/
I have two enclosures and the card.
you get around 220mb/s speed with each enclosure.
what is nice is even though they won't boot with esata the enclosures have fw800. so you can pull the esata cable out and hook up a fw800 to the mac pro and boot. your cost is 300 plus 79 for the card or 378. I have used for 2 weeks with the card and esata and for a few months before with the fw800.
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Back to the usb3 card the cal card has 2 usb3 jacks this is a stand alone 3tb usb enclosure from seagate
it could be a reason to use usb3. it lets you store 3tb info which means it can back your mac pro up.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/con...65QodrWv81w&A=endecaSearch&Ntt=seagate+3TB&Q=
the drive has many adapters it has a usb3 base i will find the link
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/accessories
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/accessories
and Frys.com has the plain usb2 version for $199 ? not a bad price for a single 3TB
Random question. Is light-peak a fiber optic system that will create universal ports/connections for all devices? Meaning, no need for USB/FireWire/DVI/Mini DisplayPort, etc as it will create universal connections a la USB, and at blazing fast speeds? Or am I completely off my rocker about Light-peak? I haven't had much chance to read up on it. If that is true, than company's would have to adapt a different universal connection in leu of USB, etc. I need to read up on it.
You can't boot off an eSATA drive on a Mac Pro, and if all your other drives are sunning at 3Gb/s would that negatively impact the overall performance of adding aN eSATA III 6Gb/s external drive? What would the overall benefit be for an external eSATA III drive?
I'm more interest in the USB 3 PCIe for my Hex Mac Pro. USB 3 is being adapted by many companies quicker than expected.
Yep.
Nope.
It doesn't look like mechanical hard drives will exceed the bandwidth limits of SATA II anytime soon. The only reason why SATA III (6Gb/s) is interesting are SSDs. If you're not going to be using SSDs, or port-multiplying a lot of regular HDs over a single SATA port, then SATA II will be more than good enough.
Loa
Awesome. Thanks for the info. I won't be getting into SSDs any time soon so SATA III won't benefit me much yet. Light-peak seems VERY interesting. I know they debuted it in 2008 on a (of all things) Mac Pro system (maybe not debuted but demonstrated). That truly amazes me, creating a faster yet simplified and universal system that moderates the external and internal communication system, requiring only a single universal connection for devices from external hard drives to displays. A system that carries video/audio/data/etc through one fiber optic channel. Hmmmmm...
The caldigit usb 3.0 drivers broke under 10.6.5. Waiting for them to update before I can test it out now. They need Apples developer kit on it to fix it. Hopefully in a few days.
edit: New drivers were sent to me last night and now it seems to work fine with a 3rd party usb flash drive from supertalent.
edit: New drivers were sent to me last night and now it seems to work fine with a 3rd party usb flash drive from supertalent.
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