Thunderbolt support.

Status
Not open for further replies.

tmacka88

Patron
Joined
Jul 5, 2011
Messages
268
Well with the new era of thunderbolt I would like to see freenas 8 integrated with this feature. Motherboards are now coming with the Apple dominated thunderbolt such as this one:

http://event.asus.com/2012/mb/P8Z77_Series_Motherboards/index.htm

Now I would like to be able to connect my freenas to a PC/MAC via thunderbolt and be able to transfer files at potentially 10gB/s speed (obviously limited to the drives of course), thus remaining clear of the network bolt neck. For me I like to transfer large files to my NAS fast, once they are on there its fine to strem them over the network at the speed it is at. I know you can setup LACP but its more effort than its work including money for a supported switch and having dual RJ45 ports on your computer (in which my imac only has one. ATM my Mac does not have thunderbolt ergo can not add another ethernet via that).

Anyway thought I would put it out there and see what you guys think and if it could be integrated into freenas.

Prob an over kill but speed=better..
 

Joshua Parker Ruehlig

Hall of Famer
Joined
Dec 5, 2011
Messages
5,949
if thunderbolt supported in the FreeBSD kernel yet? If not, we gotta get it in FreeBSD before FreeNAS could implement it
 

tmacka88

Patron
Joined
Jul 5, 2011
Messages
268
yeh not sure. i will have a look when i get a chance. Chances are its not.
 

tmacka88

Patron
Joined
Jul 5, 2011
Messages
268
I wonder when FreeBSD 10 will be out. I think Thunderbold will be a great addition to FreeNAS. Set it apart from every other NAS for sure.
 

cyberjock

Inactive Account
Joined
Mar 25, 2012
Messages
19,526
I'm not sure I'd expect Thunderbolt to be in FreeBSD 10. FreeBSD isn't exactly a common OS making support for new technologies sometimes difficult. However, it is an Intel product, and they seem to care about supporting FreeBSD.

I'm not sure if its something I'd ever recommend in a setup that you want to 'safely' store your data. Plenty of users have had nightmares with USB and I'm doubting that Thunderbolt fixes any of those limitations.
 

tio

Contributor
Joined
Oct 30, 2013
Messages
119
I'm not sure I'd expect Thunderbolt to be in FreeBSD 10. FreeBSD isn't exactly a common OS making support for new technologies sometimes difficult. However, it is an Intel product, and they seem to care about supporting FreeBSD.

I'm not sure if its something I'd ever recommend in a setup that you want to 'safely' store your data. Plenty of users have had nightmares with USB and I'm doubting that Thunderbolt fixes any of those limitations.
Thunderbolt (or the more mainstream of what was supposed to be Lightpeak) is just an external PCI express bus. There's no conversion hardware going TB-TB and no issues you have with USB or even firewire as theres a bridge board layer at both ends before it hits the bus.

I wouldnt recommend it though as the hardware is stupidly expensive due to licensing and low adoption rates. 10Gb NIC's are easier and cheaper
 

tmacka88

Patron
Joined
Jul 5, 2011
Messages
268
good point on the 10Gb nic.

Any recommendations for cheap 10Gb NIC & routers.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

tio

Contributor
Joined
Oct 30, 2013
Messages
119
Anything from Intel on the NIC side. As for routers, you are looking at something rather expensive as 10GB switches are the Netgear profsafe XS708E at a snip under £700 for a 8 port variant.

A bit of a way round this highly expensive setup is stick in some standard 4 port gig cards and bond the channels using a standard gigabit switch. Much more cost effective, just a few more cables.

Back to the basics though, does your computer even support this kind of throughput where a setup above is even necessary? To give you an idea, i have a new Haswell MBA, straight PCIE 2x SSSD in it will just about manage a 120MBps at near saturation to my NAS. A Mac pro i tested with a SATA 3 SSD and a 10GB card in it for giggles barely scraped 150MBps. This isnt a limitation on the network, its a limitation on how fast you can physically push the data to your NAS as well as the overall spindle speed of the slowest drive in there.

This is about sequential speed which if you're pushing large files across will hit the real world performance of your platter based HD's pretty quick. WD RED sequential maximum is a smidge below that of a 1000TX network connection.

Its a more of a "would be nice" feature but the actual real world usage for it is minuscule when better and cheaper methods such as channel bonding already exist and will overcome a bottleneck by adding in another Gig card (single port or multi) to give faster read access to machines that support it.
 

tmacka88

Patron
Joined
Jul 5, 2011
Messages
268
Hey,

Yeah, your right. I think eventually I will just use link aggregation. My NAS is quite beastey I think, but I have never really tested it's performance since I have built it a week ago.
 

tmacka88

Patron
Joined
Jul 5, 2011
Messages
268
But I do want to max my speed out if I can.

I wonder what the max speed would be for 6 HDDs in RAIDz2 would be. I think the rest of the system would be able to keep up. I also have 2 LAN's just gotta setup LACP.
 

tio

Contributor
Joined
Oct 30, 2013
Messages
119
The same write speed for a 3 drive or higher RAIDZ as the write speed is set for the slowest drive.

I have a 6 drive RZ2 in a N54L and i can get saturation on writes but reads on a bonded 2Gb network approached 80% saturation before dropping off. Again, not many systems can handle a data write of in excess of 120MBps of raw incompressible data (which is why you see SSD numbers so high is they deal in compressible figures, raw incompressible data is around 50MBps better than a spindle in my experience).
 

russnas

Contributor
Joined
May 31, 2013
Messages
113
Back to the basics though, does your computer even support this kind of throughput where a setup above is even necessary? To give you an idea, i have a new Haswell MBA, straight PCIE 2x SSSD in it will just about manage a 120MBps at near saturation to my NAS. A Mac pro i tested with a SATA 3 SSD and a 10GB card in it for giggles barely scraped 150MBps.

whats your speed with disk speed test?
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blackmagic-disk-speed-test/id425264550

on my MBA 2013 i manage 439MB write, 643MB read,
i also have a 2012 retina ssd thinking it would fit in my air, but since i cant use it directly the bottle neck is the usb or sata controller , 341MB write 393MB read and nas cifs its 70mb read/write.

thunderbolt hub for mac is around 300$ while you can get a usb 3.0 alternative for 45$, same with thunder to Ethernet, while usb 3.0 alternative is 20$ and you can run that through a plugable hub, the only benefit thunderbolt has been in the last 2 years is for the display since the adapter is affordable, i only have one port so i cant have display and ethernet, very few accessories.

they never made a thunderbolt to usb 3.0 that would benefit the macbook mid 2011 range,

i wouldnt use thunderbolt for data due to the usb like connection, its not very secure when the cord is moved.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1521444&page=9
 

Plato

Contributor
Joined
Mar 24, 2016
Messages
101
Not sure if it's right to resurrect this thread, but it's closer to what I require and don't want to open an additional similar request..
AFAIK, this thread is mostly about thunderbolt direct connection, but what I require is Thunderbolt 3 PCI-E expansion boxes..

As I explained in this post while it seems Thunderbolt is detected, Freenas couldn't use the card connected to the TB3 port. Is it possible to fix this? Or am I missing something, like a setting on BIOS to make use of TB3 port without making any changes in OS.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top