Thunderbolt Supports Booting From External Disk

[shrimpdude]

External display?

[deleted]

 

[Torrijos]

Because TB uses the Displayport jack, doesn't that mean you can't use an external display and a TB drive simultaneously? That kind of kills the appeal of docking to a big external drive for me, unless there's a way to split the connector between drives and displays.

You can thank to the "magical" daisy chain capacity of TB...

If you have a display without a ThunderBolt port (current and past displays) you should put that display at the end of the chain, because that Display doesn't offer a TB port to continue the chain.

Once (if ever) displays become available with ThunderBolt ports you can connect them anywhere on the chain (of ThunderBolt devices).

CURRENT possibilities example :
You have a MBPro 15'' with ThunderBolt, whenever you get home you can connect like this :
MBPro <- ((Promise RAID enclosure)^(1 to 6)) <- DisplayPort (or other ports with an adapter) display.

You could buy your MBPro with the smallest of SSDs or the slowest mechanical drive, then once home boot from the Promise enclosure getting better transfer rates than with the internal drive while having better data security, at the cost of a small increase in access times.

 

[AidenShaw]

useful - not required

On the electrical/protocol side, the two may or may not be identical. I believe eSATA devices are required to support several features that are optional for internal SATA devices, including hot-pluggability and support for port multipliers. People who extend a motherboard SATA port to an external connector often find out about these differences the hard way.

There are many device scenarios where neither hot-plugability nor PM is supported. I don't believe that either is a "requirement" for the standard - they're just good marketing buzzwords.

I have a Windows Server 2003 system that came from the factory with an eSATA port. It does not support hot-plug - reboots are necessary to connect or disconnect eSATA drives. It mostly supports PM - but on the first 4 drives, the 5th drive is invisible and is not usable.

I have a system with an eSATA port on the mobo that does not support PM. (As you commented, this is essentially the same case as adding a bulkhead connector and connector to an internal SATA port.)

My experience is that hot-plug is mostly a software issue - a system that hot-plugs fine with Windows Server 2008 R2 won't hot-plug under Windows Server 2003.

The PM issue is mostly hardware - some SATA controllers are fine with eSATA connections, but simply do not support PM.

Another issue is NIS support - this allows concurrent IOs to be active on multiple ports of a PM. Very important for performance, but not required.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_multiplier for some more info and pointers.

 

[Sylonien]

Now that it's finally confirmed. Should one still go for the iMac BTO internal SSD?

Since that SSD is rather slow compared to what's available on the market and the ability to run RAID. Question is when external enclosures are going to be available.

Too much news and stuff coming all the time. Too quickly! Can't decide. With SSD BTO was 4-6 weeks before but it's just dropped down to 2-4 days (UK). What to do what to do.

 

[PaulMBe]

Yes,

we have got OS X Lion Server running on a Mac Mini, using the Pegasus R4 as the boot device, so there is no data at all on the mac mini.

In case of disaster, just change the mac mini into another one!

We are putting all our findings on our blog --> www.idontcare.be

Cheerios