OK, I'll bite. How would YOU have designed it? It's a box that holds 8 bays. It's heavy. It needs handles. It kind of designs itself. I have the two Thunderbay 4's and I wish they had handles which would make them look almost exactly like this.
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OWC's ThunderBay Flex 8 Storage and Expansion Tower for Macs Now Available
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OK, I'll bite. How would YOU have designed it? It's a box that holds 8 bays. It's heavy. It needs handles. It kind of designs itself. I have the two Thunderbay 4's and I wish they had handles which would make them look almost exactly like this.
I am thankful OWC makes these available as just an enclosure. As for price - very competitive. Most quality 6 & 8-Bay RAID enclosures with drives (24, 32, 72TB ranges) are out of stock and/or back ordered. Crossing my fingers that the reviews for these products come back with 5 stars.
SoftRaid and Apple are working on those issues as we speak. Softraid RAID 5 is pretty darn fast on my machine. I have two Thunderbay 4's loaded with 4 3TB HD's and 4 4TB HD's so there's a bottleneck with the physical, moving mechanisms but hardware RAID isn't going to give me any faster speeds with that setup. I love these things.
Agreed. I bought an OWC Thunder Bay 8. Performance is decent, but I couldn't believe the quality of design. Screws needed to mount drives, and no fan switch or temperature regulation. Too noisy for my work area. (I use SSDs.)
Skip SoftRAID, by the way. I've discovered OpenZFS, which is more robust, more flexible, cross-platform, higher performance, and entirely free. OpenZFS is amazing!
[automerge]1594228465[/automerge]
Try OpenZFS. It's amazing. I swap a RAID array between Catalina and Ubuntu 20.04, no problems. Slightly faster than SoftRAID. Yes, ZFS is managed by command line, but there are easy instructions available on the Internet.
openzfs.org
(I just made a donation.)
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Yeah. It's a shame. But I get it — Thunderbolt stuff is both relatively complicated to implement, and has a very small market slice. Which leads to high prices, which in turn further decreases the interested market segment.
Intel unbundled Thunderbolt from the CPU. I've got Thunderbolt 3 going on an AMD Linux system, via a PCIe card.
I have a couple 4 bay rackmount OWC RAID DAS devices and they are GREAT, especially compared to the Sonnet devices they replaced. The drives don't need sleds, no tools to swap a drive, fairly quiet, fast enough for what I do. I just wish they came with a thunderbolt port.
Looks very nice and the price is a little bit up but I think is ok. You can put everything in there and the way the thunderbolt ports are configured, one in one out.
Dude, Unless you bought both of those Mac Pros used, they were like $15K range machines each new. When I got our 2012 2.93 12 cores with 96GB RAM they were 12K back then. How could you possibly expect something for $4k ?
Even an iMac Pro with respectable specs...for a pro level is like $10k. I think the new Mac Pro can be configured for somewhere in the $12K range for a reasonable performance level. I would say that if you NEED the other options...afterburner dual Vega Pro II cards, then you are most likely using it as a tool and making money with it. We are getting 3 at work and they will be in the $21K range...but that is for a business environment (post production).
On the main topic, I think this OWC box is cool because I keep thinking about replacing my 2010 5,1, but can't spend and don't need a new Mac Pro, but have a ******** of drives. internally and externally. I could go to a used trash can for not much money and have a way to still have all my different drive volumes.
Remember, this can handle an egpu as well. Presumably you could use that slot for yet more storage expansion.
Intel Shares Details on Thunderbolt 4, Launching Later This Year
Intel today shared some new details on the upcoming launch of Thunderbolt 4, which is set debut later this year. While Thunderbolt 4 won't deliver any increase over the maximum 40 Gb/s available on Thunderbolt 3, there are some notable improvements such as universal cables up to two meters...forums.macrumors.com
ATM, TB4 is an Intel-exclusive technology because it requires Intel CPU support to enable the mandated DMA protection. Intel hasn't clarified if AMD or other CPU can replace that protection.
Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d), specialized hardware capabilities built into Intel processors is the foundation for DMA protection on Thunderbolt ports that helps prevent physical DMA attacks. These solutions block peripheral devices from unauthorized access to system memory. Leading operating systems such as Windows, MacOS, and Linux have already implemented DMA protection using Intel VT-d technology. Intel’s Thunderbolt 4 certification requires VT-d based DMA protection. It is strongly recommended on computers with Thunderbolt 3 ports and has been enabled on PCs, where supported...
Source: https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2020/07/intel-thunderbolt4-security-brief.pdf
Wasn't Apple the co-developer of Thunderbolt, if that's the case then why the above restriction?
Western Digital just released 18TB Enterprise HDD.
www.techpowerup.com
I'd expect OWC to have 18TB drives soon.
Western Digital Finally Launches Ultrastar DC HC550 18 TB Drives With EAMR for Enterprise
Western Digital had already announced the Ultrastar DC HC550 drives back in late 2019, but only now have they actually been released for sale. The new drives make use of CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording), where data is stored in parallel tracks that increase rewriting proficiency of the...
I'd expect OWC to have 18TB drives soon.
Spinning drives over Thunderbolt?!?
DAS in 2020 is really something I would think twice about... yes, there may be a niche, but a damn small one. Probably a photographer using it as DAS for his MacBook Pro. The problem with DAS is also that everything needs to managed by the client OS (backups, versioning, deduplication,...). On a NAS this can be taken care of by the NAS itself at any time.
Mac Pro user will more likely use a NAS or SAN over their 20GBit Network anyway...
DAS in 2020 is really something I would think twice about... yes, there may be a niche, but a damn small one. Probably a photographer using it as DAS for his MacBook Pro. The problem with DAS is also that everything needs to managed by the client OS (backups, versioning, deduplication,...). On a NAS this can be taken care of by the NAS itself at any time.
Mac Pro user will more likely use a NAS or SAN over their 20GBit Network anyway...
If you want an eGPU save 80% on the price and buy an actual eGPU enclosure that has a properly sized PSU.
They don't seem to promote this as an option for an eGPU – I'm guessing the card options would be limited due to size?
Love the old Mac Pro design. Apple should have kept it instead of the cheese grater although I think the cheese grater is probably more efficient with cooling.
Intel owns the standard, not Apple. Apple worked with them but they don't own it. Source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/1..._will_be_transferred_from_apple_to_intel.html
However, it looks like The Verge got some news from Apple that Apple Silicon Macs will support TB (USB-C): https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...licon-chips-will-support-thunderbolt.2244967/
But it is not clear if it is USB-C or TB4.
TB3 will be a part of USB4 standard, so Apple could support USB4 without supporting TB4.
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lol "Dude", no. Not even close. Power Mac G5's started at $1999, then Intel Mac Pro's started at $2499. This may be before your time. I had owned over 7 Mac Pro's in the 2000's through 2014 ranging from $2799 to $4000 fully decked out. Most did not purchase Apple RAM as it was - and is - overpriced. Third party RAM and HDD's were simply swapped into the 4 SATA II bays. You're using extreme examples of CURRENT Mac Pro and iMac Pro systems and, frankly, they aren't applicable as updating Mac Pro's before the 2013 revision weren't expensive after selling the previous model and simply putting in your internal storage, RAM, and any PCIe cards from one to the other. Many of us bought GPU's and replaced the base GPU - this was especially true when Apple supported nVidia cards.
Lastly, as I clearly stated, this is regarding PROSUMER market use. Apple used to design and sell the Mac Pro with a myriad of BTO's that allowed anyone from prosumers to professionals/editing houses/studios/etc the ability to fully configure reasonably priced workstations. Additionally, Apple had a dedicated CCFL LCD line - 20", 23", 30" ACD's that were top of the line displays. I still have 2 30" models running in one of my home offices.
This isn't about "oh my god, get over it, you can make that money back with work, bro" discussions. My comment you intentionally misrepresented for some odd personal agenda and point stands: Apple used to make reasonably priced Pro systems. They don't anymore. Period.
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It has 4 bays on top for nvme drives.
You know there are SSD drives for SATA, right?
You could do multiple RAIDs on the same setup. Spinning drives is still the prefer way to back up data. NVME is way overkill for data backup, especially the cost per bit.
Also, NAS can't back up your stuff on its own; you can install tools from the NAS vendor but you could just simply let Time Machine back up to DAS/NAS As well. What you can do with NAS, you can do with DAS.
Also, if you're using wireless, DAS will always be faster wired in.
Why do you believe that when Apple said the transition would be complete in two years they meant something other that? While they will continue supporting Intel hardware in macOS, I am confident that they meant what they said and that they will have fully transitioned to Apple Silicon within that period.
Apple was referring to the FIRST ARM Mac's, not ALL Mac's. ARM architecture is no where near ready to compete with an Intel Xeon 28-Core system let alone the current base model Xeon processors in Mac Pro's and iMac Pro's. That's ways off. MacBook's, iMac's, Mac mini's will have no problem transitioning. Intel architecture will be supported for a while longer. I also stated 3-4 years, which is puzzling as your quoted reply is essentially in agreement.