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Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

chrisbergeron.com

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Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#51

Post by biztos »

kilroy123 wrote: post #29
whalesalad wrote: post #18

Just yesterday I was thinking how badly I want an obscenely fast local datastore for Docker. I am managing a handful of clients right now who are all using Docker containers for their microservice environments and my local machine runs out of disk daily. What I really want is lightning quick network storage, but I don't think it would be feasible to roll out 10g networking in my current rental home.

Just curious what size is your hard drive? I had this pain with my last macbook. I ALWAYS ran out of disk space. Never again! I went with a 1 TB drive for my M1.

I got the 2TB drive so I can run out of even more disk space! ;-)

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#53

Post by 21com »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #49

Funny I went down this rathole very shortly after discovering the "Thunderbolt networking" change in the Linux kernel. My hope was the use the Linux box (with 10 GbE) as a bridge/switch to give my Mac cheap 10 GbE access. While point-to-point did hit more or less the expected speed, bridging was horribly slow. Ended up just getting an Sonnet Solo10G SFP+ adapter (which is great).

> bridging was horribly slow.

Can you quantify that? (I'm wondering if it might be good-enough for my needs.)

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#54

Post by filoleg »

systemvoltage wrote: post #44
reacharavindh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Local storage and Networked storage always have their places. Local solid state storage almost always gets you better performance because you negate the overhead of network. Unless, you’re talking fancy arrays connected to saturate 100G NICs. Local storage falls apart the moment you need that storage accessible from another machine…

Dumb question: Can you use Mac's shared folder for another machine to access files?

Yep, it is possible. Here is the official support page on how to set up a shared folder that would be accessible by a any machine using SMB[0], and here is one for access by a macOS machine[1] (that is a bit simpler for setting up certain advanced config options).

0. https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/share-mac-files-wit...

1. https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/set-up-file-sharing...

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#55

Post by [deleted] »

minhazm wrote: post #7
reacharavindh wrote: post #3

Not to take away anything from the fun of figuring out Thunderbolt on Linux, and such. But, I wonder if a NAS with a 40 Gbps or even 100Gbps NIC hooked up to a Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter would achieve a better result without extra effort.

The fastest thunderbolt to ethernet adapter I could find is 25 Gbps and it's $1500. 10 Gbps ones are in the $200+ range as well.

[deleted]

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#56

Post by jsjohnst »

schmookeeg wrote: post #12
jasonjackson wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

probably, but thunderbolt would cost 5x less for equivalent 40Gbps NIC

This has not been my experience -- I use both thunderbolt 3 and Mellanox ConnectX-3 40gbps cards, and have been looking for an excuse to add a Mini M1 to the homelab. The cables and cards for PC Thunderbolt retrofit are far (like 3-5X!) more expensive than the MLNX cards and optical cables. $0.02 :)

> The cables and cards for PC Thunderbolt retrofit are far (like 3-5X!) more expensive than the MLNX cards and optical cables.

I added new Thunderbolt3 PCIe cards (Gigabyte Titan Ridge) to two of my 2012 Mac Pros for around $100 each a bit over a year ago and the prices have dropped since, so I don't get how that is 3-5x more expensive than MLNX cards. Expense was way way lower a factor than the finesse it took to get MacOS to support them for me, but it was the only path that worked for my needs (different need than OP article) and so I endured the pain of getting it working.

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#57

Post by cyberge99 »

insaneirish wrote: post #46

There's something weird here: root@nas-04:~ # ifconfig thunderbolt0 10.1.1.2 root@nas-04:~ # ifconfig thunderbolt0 thunderbolt0: flags=4163 mtu 1500 inet 192.168.10.2 netmask 255.0.0.0 broadcast 10.255.255.255 The IP on the interface is different than the one that it was theoretically configured with. My suspicion is that perhaps the IP used was changed at some point and this is just an editing slip. > Now that the i…

Author here: You’re correct, it’s an editing error. There’s another where I do ifconfig on the mini, but I pasted from the nas. I’ll correct the post.

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#58

Post by unicornfinder »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #52

This is cool, but my main takeaway is that you can get around needing the thunderbolt enablement header by shorting two pins together and use it on any motherboard? What the hell Intel...

If memory serves the main problem is some Thunderbolt cards don't ship with the necessary firmware on them, so would need to be used at least once in a supported motherboard before just used in any system.

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#59

Post by jbverschoor »

biztos wrote: post #51
kilroy123 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious what size is your hard drive? I had this pain with my last macbook. I ALWAYS ran out of disk space. Never again! I went with a 1 TB drive for my M1.

I got the 2TB drive so I can run out of even more disk space! ;-)

A larger common image + saner node_modules should save a lot

Re: Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux

#60

Post by conradev »

I was actually looking for something like this. I have one computer that I want to back up to both local hard drives and to the cloud.

A NAS is great, because you can back up to it and have the backup stored on local hard drives, but it also has a CPU and it can be responsible for uploading the data to the cloud. This is better to do from a dedicated device, especially if you are uploading large amounts of data with limited bandwidth, which I am.

The constraint is that locally backing up to a NAS is slow, even though it is sitting next to my computer. Instead of buying into 10GbE networking, it’d be nice to just use a Thunderbolt cable.

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