WOOHOO!! Sweeeeet, check THIS out, Mac Mini & HDX

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by mmk

that is so clean wow great idea, what about drive space though? what are you doing for that? i have 6hd in my comp and i still feel the need for more

I'm guessing a ThunderBolt cable going out of the enclosure and into a nice storage system :)

[markuse]

Nice setup indeed! What's the deal in terms of fan noise? A little while ago I was using the Sonnet Echo Desktop Chassis and it turned out to be a little Pavarotti

Is there actually communication going on between the mac mini and the x-mac regarding cpu temperature / fan speed ?

Thanks,
Markus

[Mikey MTC]

I was going to ask the same question about fan noise. The Sonnet website mentions an optional quieter fan for use with certain types of cards that don't get as hot. Apparently a Pro Tools card qualifies for this and it's RAID controllers and similar that are the hot ones.

The thing would have to be seriously quiet to be considered - plus as noted, it doesn't hold the hard drives and it goes for $1,295, so not the cheapest solution, but it does look like a decent quality and well thought out product.

What about this Magma offering teased at the latest AES - The Roben 3? I'm still not sure what features it has and it's larger than this Sonnet box but finally solutions are coming out for those who can't afford or desire to kit out the new Mac Pro.

[tamasdragon]

Very nice setup! I plan to build almost the same setup, but maybe with the native card in it. Still waiting for Magma to introduce their new line of products.

[SmokinBaldMonkey]

Kristo, I hadn't heard that, really?

[SmokinBaldMonkey]

Drew, before you drop money on the magma (which I already bought and returned because it felt like a cheap tin toy and was noisy as hell AND you have to manually swap jumpers to change fan settings), check out the other two Sonnet boxes, they have two units that are 3-slot Thunderbolt II. Actually its the same base unit but the 2-space rack-mount version has an additional bay with space for housing storage drives…

They're ultra-quiet, don't need blowers, and I personally happen to know that the FOH guy for RUSH is using one right now on tour with a rack mac mini...

[Kristo Kotkas]

Originally Posted by SmokinBaldMonkey

Kristo, I hadn't heard that, really?

I did not know the details, seems AAX will be possible only with their hardware. How they will be able to make faster-than-realtime processing with DSP based plugins is something I'm not getting Wasn't TDM the reason we did not have FTRT bounce?

Well, anyways, I guess we should look here for more info: http://www.uaudio.com/blog/support-report-aax-format/

Kristo

[SmokinBaldMonkey]

Hey Chris, Its still called the xMac Mini Server, but i think the part number changed because they combined the the previous two units into one, increased the power supply and added a 75w aux power connector.

[SmokinBaldMonkey]

Hey Marcus, their newer stuff is way quitter than the older stuff, I recently found out they didn't know that the audio market was into their products, so they were building without concern for noise because most of their stuff ended up in server rooms…now that they're aware, they're building everything with variable speed quiet-fans and such….

[SmokinBaldMonkey]

MMK - In this particular setup I have a Sonnet Tempo Card in the 2nd PCIe slot. This is a PCIe card that holds one or two 2.5" drives, either mechanical or SSD. Since I have the HDX card in the full length slot space, I can put half of the Tempo Card in the half length slot space and I used a 480 GB SSD (you can barely see it in the photo under the Thunderbolt card - its blue) This gives me about 6.5 hours of record time with 48 channels of 96K. But you could also use a 2 TB spinning drive and quadruple the storage. Or, if you are only using the HD Native card, then you can put that in the half length slot space and put the full Tempo SSD in the full length slot space. This lets you mount two drives (SSD or HDD) on the card. This either doubles your record capacity or you record to both drives simultaneously for redundancy.

The Tempo card is like a full-length card that can be broken in half to fit a smaller lci slot, so if you use the small half, you get one drive in a PCI slot, but if you use both halves of the tempo in a full-length slot, you get to mount two drives on it. I have another rig with a full tempo sad and a pair of 2TB drives on it as well….