Yes, I was wondering what you meant as I didn't see how being at idle would effect consumed memory but I understand now what you mean.
Is the box connecting at TB1 (10 Gb/s) or TB2 (20 Gb/s)? System Profiler > Thunderbolt/USB4, click the Magma box, check Speed. There may have been both a TB1 and a TB2 version of the Magma ExpressBox 3T; the TB controller sits on a removable PCIe card as well so you could check it out. I got around 900 MB/s via TB1 FWIW.
Replied to this already when I saw your edit but this is what I see with clearer wording:
That means it's connecting at Thunderbolt 1 speed. It might be your TB cable -- or (more likely) your box might have a TB1 controller in it. The easiest way to verify is to have a look at the TB card in the box itself; the TB chip on it must be a DSL5520. If it's something else, it's TB1. (Another way is to compile pciutils on macOS and use the
lspci command included with them.)
Just checked: my elgato TB Dock 2 is also reported the same way. All my cables are Apple originals.
On my iMac, both eGPU and SSD report "20 Gb/s x1". All three are TB2 (using the Intel DSL5520) and my SSD is benchmarking at TB2 speeds (1400 MB/s).
It is weird that the elgato TB2 dock is also reported the same way.
Either that or the year of its release. I have three Light Ridge devices -- this thing, a Belkin dock and a Matrox DS1 dock.
I turn EVERYTHING off EVERY night. Everything. Entire house <50W.
...with a 5400rpm hdd. These things were total slugs after Apple tricked everyone into "upgrading" to Catalina. (And heaven help you if you had drive-encryption enabled too. --It's pretty easy for an OEM to convince you that your car is pathetically obsolete after pouring sugar in the gas tank.)
What the heck machine was this on? A "pizza-box"?
Thanks. Wow, just looked at Expressbox 3T TB2 boxes in ebay and they are still expensive. I've seen them advertised new in old webstores for about $1000 when they were still available 10+ years ago. They have kept their pricing quite well, people are asking 200-400+ euros for used ones. 😱 Not much availability for such expansion chassis on the market I guess?
You can find the PCI device IDs of the Thunderbolt controllers in the ioreg output.
And then there is this weird way of reporting it... it is reported same way on both ends. This is Monterey.
I think that's normal for Thunderbolt 1 devices:
cd "/Volumes/Work/Programming/ThunderboltProjects/ThunderboltDROM"
# load the commands
source "Scripts/ThunderboltUtil.sh"
# load DROM data copied from ioreg -fliw0 output as hex string
loadstring "7B 50 C4 EA 01 03 00 01 00 C8 CF 43 FB 01 66 00 01 00 04 80 01 06 08 81 00 00 60 2A 00 00 0B 82
00 01 40 0A 00 00 00 00 00 0E 01 41 70 70 6C 65 2C 20 49 6E 63 2E 00 22 02 54 68 75 6E 64 65 72
62 6F 6C 74 20 74 6F 20 46 69 72 65 57 69 72 65 20 41 64 61 70 74 65 72 00 1A 30 44 54 4E 37 33
31 33 30 35 45 47 46 34 39 34 41 4D 00 00 00 00 00 00 00"
listdroms
1)
thedrom=7b50c4ea0103000100c8cf43fb01660001000480010608810000602a00000b820001400a00000000000e014170706c652c20496e632e0022025468756e646572626f6c7420746f2046697265576972652041646170746572001a3044544e373331333035454746343934414d00000000000000
sources:
string:1
dumpdromall
=======================================
1)
0x01) UID: 0x0001000301EAC450 // Vendor ID (USB-IF):0x0001 Component ID:0x000301EAC45 Router ID:0x0
0x0d) Version: 1 // TBT3
0x10) TBT3-Vendor ID: 0x1
0x12) TBT3-Device ID: 0x8004
0x14) TBT3-Model Revision: 0x1
0x15) TBT3-NVM Revision: 6
0x16) 1: 0000602a0000 // TBT3-Lane Adapter { Lane:0, Dual-Lane Link Capable:No, 2nd Adapter Num:0, Unknown:0x602a0000 }
0x1e) 2: 0001400a0000000000 // TBT3-PCIe Upstream Adapter { xx:00.0, Unknown:0x01400a0000000000 }
0x29) 1: "Apple, Inc." // ASCII Vendor Name
0x37) 2: "Thunderbolt to FireWire Adapter" // ASCII Model Name
0x59) 30: 44544e373331333035454746343934414d00000000000000 // Vendor Specific Type
0x73) End
xxd -p -r <<< 44544e373331333035454746343934414
DTN731305EGF494AI have an ATTO ThunderLink TB2 box that has a Sonnet CUBO card in it. If you found one for cheap it would be worth a try I guess. (The majority of ThunderLink boxes on eBay are TB1.)
Possibly "only a pro would buy these and a pro has deep pockets" thinking on the seller's side too.
It doesn't work at all?
Light Ridge can connect one PCIe device at four lanes or (up to) four PCIe devices at one lane each.
No, nothing. The drive(s) do not appear and the card doesn't even become visible in the bus.
Yeah, in the 5,1, it converts PCIe 3.0 ×4 to PCIe 2.0 ×8. But in the Magma, the best it could get is a PCIe 2.0 ×4 link to Light Ridge, which the SSD already gets on its own.
It is weird that they have marked the PCIe slots x2, x4 and x8 if the controller can only support x4.
You can put in ×8 cards (×2/×4 slots don't allow this unless they are modified). Can you put in a second PCIe card and check if the SSD gets downgraded to ×1 speed (around 400 MB/s or so)?
That's the way! I'll be very interested in seeing the outcome of it.
I originally took the video capture card out but today I put it back just to see if it appears in the pci list. And it does, doesn't say anything interesting though, just "video" or something.