Sonnet & Magma Anyone tested. Out yet?

[KenSluiter]

Now I'm wondering if only the older PCI HD cards actually need a driver. Perhaps the HDX and Native cards will run in a Magma or Sonnet w/o a driver.

Can anyone confirm this?

Thanks,
Ken Sluiter

[sidh]

Originally Posted by KenSluiter

Did you have to install a "thunderbolt aware" driver?

Are you addressing your Pro Tools cards vix thunderbolt port? or just video cards?

No drivers necessary - just works
No video cards - just 1 HDX card in the chassis connected via TB to the TB display which is in turn connected to the laptop via TB cable.

[KenSluiter]

ok. well. that's what I needed to hear. I'm gonna assume that if it "just works" w/ an HDX card, than it will just work w/ a Native Card.

[Spydog1985]

Originally Posted by sidh

No drivers necessary - just works
No video cards - just 1 HDX card in the chassis connected via TB to the TB display which is in turn connected to the laptop via TB cable.

How did you get one of these? They're not out yet.?

[Pirate Post]

I thought that Macs needs a specific driver written for each card while PCs don't.

[Oliver M]

Originally Posted by sidh

No drivers necessary - just works
No video cards - just 1 HDX card in the chassis connected via TB to the TB display which is in turn connected to the laptop via TB cable.

Actually one is supposed to make the connection vice versa. The Thunderbolt chassis connects to the Mac, the Display to the chassis' bottom TB port.


Oliver

[XmenX]

Magma Thunderbolt 3T requires no driver, software and firmware.

In order for a certain PCIe card to work in Thunderbolt Expansion chassis you would need a Thunderbolt Compatible driver, which is provided by the manufacturer or developer of PCIe card.

There are manufacturers or developers of PCIe cards that bundle their Software and Driver altogether. This means upon installation of Software you are also installing the driver.

Checkout this Articles posted on http://expansionsystem.com

http://expansionsystem.com/forum/top...rds-in-macbook

NOTE:For MacOS, a driver modification is required from the PCIe card vendor to allow cards to work through Thunderbolt in ExpressBox 3T. You should check with the maker of your PCIe card to get a Thunderbolt Compatible Driver.


http://expansionsystem.com/forum/top...-compatibility

[sidh]

Originally Posted by Spydog1985

How did you get one of these? They're not out yet.?

I bought a pre-production unit.

[sidh]

Originally Posted by Oliver M

Actually one is supposed to make the connection vice versa. The Thunderbolt chassis connects to the Mac, the Display to the chassis' bottom TB port.


Oliver

My display is connected to the top port. The mac is then connected to the display.

[Nistov]

I have both the Sonnet xMac mini server unit and the Magma chassis. I have not done extensive testing yet but they both seems to be working fine with the Native card.

As for HDX, Magma is probably the only solution due to the fact that the card requires an additional power connection that is available in the Magma, but not present in the Sonnet xMac.

In my xMac unit I have installed a Mid-2011 server version Mac Mini. With the Native card installed and the unit hooked up to a Promise Pegasus R4 Thunderbolt RAID, I can arm 256 mono tracks - hit record - and disk activity goes up to around 30%. It feels really responsive but not instant...

In reality you would not have more than 64 tracks recording due to the I/O limitation of the card and then you are hitting single digit activity numbers when recording to one of the internal drives... And in this case hitting record feels instant.

So Sonnet and Native is all good except for a minor detail (depending on how you look at it). Those stock fans they have mounted inside makes A LOT OF NOISE...

The Magma unit is not silent but it is virtually silent next to the Sonnet... So Magma just seems to work fine with both HDX and Native whereas the xMac is only an option for the Native card (unless you start modifying stuff in order to source more power for the HDX card). Don't know if the other options from Sonnet includes this extra power connection or not...

Anyway - this is the future and it is really fun.