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Big FAIL of ALL Thunderbolt docks
- Thread starter cube
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Yes but it is really the big deal? I just thought about that again there are the devices which use esata. Is it the big deal to stuff some power in the esatap connector through a usb connector, usb isnt doing any magic here. Yes it is not as clean as just one cable but just use an extra usb port somewhere, it can be just from a powered usb hub which isnt even connected to a computer its just about stuffing power into the connector.
I think its nice to "still" have esata. It really feels dead and yes we may come from different ways to make money in our life but I havent seen an esata device for years in the wild.
And I havent even thought about using trim on my external ssd's. On my internal ssd I activated it just that I know yeah that may be good to enable here (which is 3rd party SSD in my macbook) but for my externals? Meh I havent even bothered. I'm booting other OS'ses from external SSDs and didnt feel anything that they are loosing read/write speeds. And when some of them die, I will gladly let them die and buy a new one. Sounds stupid but dont expect more than 5 years from any drive or storage medium. (in reality I dont expect any of my drives to be in perfect working condition in 5 years)
Edit: One thing about the USB connector stuffing power into the esatap connector. You might only to be able to use it with 2.5'' ssds and harddrives. USB has only 5V and the 3.5 use 12V I think there are 2 versions of esatap one that supports 12V and one with 5V. The question is, any esatap port you find on a laptop might only have the 5V version. But if you are going to use 2.5'' drives it should be fine.
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I had not realised of another big problem the lack of eSATA brings:
Because of Thunderbolt chipset limitations, you cannot connect a normal display and a portable Thunderbolt drive at the same time, even if the dock has a dedicated video port.
So, eSATA is the only complete portable storage solution, even when using a dock.
Because of Thunderbolt chipset limitations, you cannot connect a normal display and a portable Thunderbolt drive at the same time, even if the dock has a dedicated video port.
So, eSATA is the only complete portable storage solution, even when using a dock.
I have a Belkin Dock, a thunderbolt display a DVI display and a Caldigit T3 thunderbolt raid and various usb 3.0 drives. My set up is
like this:
Thunderbolt display to Macbook Pro Retina/ Retina to belkin dock / belkin dock to Caldigit T3 / Caldigit T3 to 2nd display (dvi to hdmi/mini display port) and then 3 usb drives connected to the Belkin dock. Also one FW800 3TB drive connected to the Belkin. I'm not sure what's up with all the esata lust or thunderbolt limitations but, some of these docks work pretty well.
C/
Did you read that I wrote PORTABLE storage, none of which have Thunderbolt passthrough?
And USB is not complete because even if some enclosures might support UNMAP translation, the Apple UAS drivers probably don't use the command.
But I wonder if there's a Thunderbolt dock that, when the HDMI port is active, would route the DisplayPort channel to HDMI, and still have the data channel active on the Thunderbolt port.
This would allow going for portable Thunderbolt storage if you plan on never using it together with a normal monitor but without a dock.
And eSATA doesn't have pass-thru for daisy-chaining capability either.
With Thunderbolt, each daisy-chain device must reconstruct the video signal, but the graphics controller back in the computer determines how many displays can be driven. The Apple specs describe this on a Mac-by-Mac basis. Apple does not support the multi-stream spec found on some Windows PCs. It's possible on some PCs to use multi-stream displays that are daisy-chainable using DP or mDP.
If you require additional displays, beyond which the Thunderbolt docks or built-in ports of MBP, Air, iMac, or Mac Pro, there are always the various USB-to-display adapters which are good enough for almost all graphics uses except high-frame-rate gaming. Most are USB 2.0, and some are now USB 3.0 for higher display resolutions.
Cube, you harp about the advantages of eSATA without understanding its limitations, or why the industry hasn't adopted it broadly. It won't be coming to Apple. Mainly because the standards for eSATA don't support hot-plug or surprise removal well. This is one thing that Thunderbolt does a little better as Apple's AHCI driver does handle these two use cases.
Past eSATA solutions had to resort to non-standard polling to detect these cases with custom drivers outside the scope of the OS built-in drivers. This polling also limited I/O performance.
eSATA will remain a smaller niche than Thunderbolt, and will slowly disappear. No big name manufacturer is promoting it today.
Did you read that you first wrote it was a Thunderbolt chipset limitation and did you read that the guy you are now replying to has actually showed you that this is a completely false statement?
Or simply put: it is not due to Thunderbolt chipset limitation that there isn't a daisy chain option on portable drives. It's the fact the portable drives use the simpler and cheaper Thunderbolt chip that doesn't provide a daisy chain option. Quite a different story.
Which will probably be the same for any Thunderbolt stuff. Apple only does things like TRIM for their own drives (they can control the firmware and thus how TRIM is working exactly).
They all do, it's how Thunderbolt works (DisplayPort in 1 stream, PCIe in another). You are asking the wrong question here: you mean if it will ever be possible to use the built in HDMI and Thunderbolt to drive non-Thunderbolt displays. The answer to that question is none or all depending on how you're going to do it. If you only want to use a dock than none will be able to because this is a limitation in Thunderbolt 1 & 2: only 1 DisplayPort channel available. That's why the second display has to be Thunderbolt. You could use an additional Thunderbolt with daisy chain option for this. You can then use 2 DisplayPort channels and thus drive 2 non-Thunderbolt displays. In both cases you will still have an active channel for data.
If the portable storage uses the advanced Thunderbolt chip you can already do this. Most portable storage (quite possibly all portable storage) don't use this chip as it consumes a bit more energy and also makes the device bigger and more costly. They use the cheaper and simpler 1 Thunderbolt port only chip (the same one used in the FW800 and Gigabit Ethernet adapters). If you want it to be portable it needs to be light, thin, small and very conservative on the energy (since it'll probably be buspowered by a notebook).
The only solution to this is to use a machine with more than 1 Thunderbolt port or with an additional display output. The MacBook Pro Retina comes with both (2 Thunderbolt ports and HDMI output) as well as the Mac Pro. The iMac comes with 2 Thunderbolt ports and already has a display. The other Macs won't suffice in this case.
Hopefully this limitation will be lifted in future Thunderbolt versions (Thunderbolt 3 hopefully which they are working on right now).
I don't need eSATA passthrough. I can connect both a monitor and a portable enclosure and have TRIM if the latter is eSATA, which I cannot do with other storage connectivity. That is the point.
You think that because Apple chooses to ignore eSATA it is irrelevant. There are many eSATA products, and even if USB is ubiquitous, many people use it. Otherwise, you would see as few devices as with Thunderbolt, which can only wish to be even as popular as FireWire.
Do you know of any 2014 shipping computer models of computers with Haswell or newer Intel chipsets that ship with eSATA or eSATAp?
I have several laptops with eSATAp built in, but they are several years old. Doesn't look like eSATA made it to newer models.
As for not needing daisy chain for eSATA, understood. Looks more like you are defining the market to be one which meets your needs rather than one which market trends and developments would indicate.
I gave eSATA a chance several years ago. Looks like there weren't enough of us.
I just saw a router with eSATA being announced today. I don't know if there were others before. Doesn't look like declining, specially since the non-Apple world does not look very excited about going Thunderbolt, which I find great since the cables are an aberration.
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I know that the enclosure makers choose to use the "cheap" chip. The point is that there's no portable enclosure with passthrough, so it doesn't matter if you could build one when you need a solution today.
I am not talking about using 2 monitors, just one normal monitor.
So the chipset limitation I was talking about was in docks. Let's clear this up:
Is there a Thunderbolt dock that allows you to use an HDMI monitor at the same time as a Thunderbolt drive which has no passthrough? (split the 2 channels to 2 different ports)
I cant help it I have to get in this thread again.
I have to ask why it is so important to have UNMAP and we are talking about portable Thunderbolt drives. So lets see the first argument why portable enclosures only have one port? Well like the others have said to be cheaper and why should they? I mean they are designed to be portable and well - if they are portable they should not really end up "between" in a chain. If they are set up this way why dont use a "desktop" external drive.
And for UNMAP/UASP/TRIM.
TRIM is for SATA drives and the controller has to support TRIM to use it. UNMAP is afaik for SAS drives or SATA drives behind a SAS Controller and thats not really the problem here when we are talking about portable enclosures.
For UASP, well that what i read about its a protocol feature of USB3. Your 2011 Macbook does not have USB3 also bad.
Just a question here: why is it so important for you? To keep the SSD healthy? Feels like you are going through much pain for lets say its not that bad for the SSD, if it does not get the commands to delete its sectors it has its own garbage collection.
A new solution I could think about now when you are already thinking about using a dock which will support USB3 why not use it and a USB3 port there and if USB3 and your enclosure can support UASP isnt that a good deal? Well yeah if you are switching between multiple pre USB3 machines then you have to take the dock with you but your case does not sound like it if you are thinking about a dock. Then again I have to think why use a portable enclosure in the first place...
I have to ask why it is so important to have UNMAP and we are talking about portable Thunderbolt drives. So lets see the first argument why portable enclosures only have one port? Well like the others have said to be cheaper and why should they? I mean they are designed to be portable and well - if they are portable they should not really end up "between" in a chain. If they are set up this way why dont use a "desktop" external drive.
And for UNMAP/UASP/TRIM.
TRIM is for SATA drives and the controller has to support TRIM to use it. UNMAP is afaik for SAS drives or SATA drives behind a SAS Controller and thats not really the problem here when we are talking about portable enclosures.
For UASP, well that what i read about its a protocol feature of USB3. Your 2011 Macbook does not have USB3 also bad.
Just a question here: why is it so important for you? To keep the SSD healthy? Feels like you are going through much pain for lets say its not that bad for the SSD, if it does not get the commands to delete its sectors it has its own garbage collection.
A new solution I could think about now when you are already thinking about using a dock which will support USB3 why not use it and a USB3 port there and if USB3 and your enclosure can support UASP isnt that a good deal? Well yeah if you are switching between multiple pre USB3 machines then you have to take the dock with you but your case does not sound like it if you are thinking about a dock. Then again I have to think why use a portable enclosure in the first place...
The thunderbolt spec does not permit bus powered devices with dual ports. Not enough power, and the complexity required to regenerate the displayport video signal. This is an Intel spec, not Apple.
Consumer Windows-little interest in Thunderbolt. USB is good enough.
A router with eSATA is not very interesting. Sure, can build a NAS. Actual purpose built NAS is better performing.
Can you identify any current computers with eSATA? I'm asking about 2014 models, not leftovers from the past.
This thread is interesting. Perhaps we might learn why eSATA is so important.
Consumer Windows-little interest in Thunderbolt. USB is good enough.
A router with eSATA is not very interesting. Sure, can build a NAS. Actual purpose built NAS is better performing.
Can you identify any current computers with eSATA? I'm asking about 2014 models, not leftovers from the past.
This thread is interesting. Perhaps we might learn why eSATA is so important.
I am repeating myself but here goes (again):
Again, the limitation you are talking about only applies to displays, it does NOT apply to thunderbolt devices! If you are using HDMI you can not use the TB ports for a non-TB display. You can use it for a TB device which can be anything: display, external drive, tb-fw800 adapter, tb-GbE adapter, etc. and it doesn't matter if those have a daisy chain option or not. The sole requirement is that it is thunderbolt.
Good examples of docks that have 2 TB ports (one is for connecting the computer, the other for daisy chaining) and a HDMI port are CalDigit and Elgato. Belkin and Matrox are the only ones that won't be able to do this (Belkin has 2 TB ports but no HDMI, Matrox has HDMI and only 1 TB port).
If you look closely you can see some of the setups here that use it like that: http://caldigit.tumblr.com/
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