You can purchase much cheaper TB to pcie converts in china. You add some generic 12v power and you're done.
Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
111–120 of 121 posts
Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
#112What are typical use cases for needing 25Gbps? Author talks about 4k video, but AI tells me that for "4K production mastering (ProRes 422 HQ, 4:2:2, 10-bit)" the rate is under 2Gbps. I'm not saying it's not needed, - just curious.
ProRes is a compressed and encoded format. In order to become ProRes, it needs to be uncompressed and decoded at some point. uncompressed and unencoded is easier to work with on the rendering side, but much heavier on the data side. Ask your AI about the DPX file format.
AI tells that for DPX 4k 60fps it's ~17Gbps
Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
#113He mentions this in the footnote:
> I have SMB multichannel enabled, but this real-world speed limitation could also be related to my use of my lower-power Arm NAS (running on Ampere Altra, with 32 fairly-slow CPU cores).
Based on my own testing with a 25 Gb NIC setup on macOS I strongly suspect the issue is not on the NAS side, and the hardware I was working with is by no means underpowered.
The Mac I was working with is one of those rack mount M2 Mac Pros with a 25 Gb PCI-e card. On the NAS side it was a several hundred terabyte all NVMe flash multi-node cluster, each node with Xeon CPUs and 2x 25 Gb bonded NICs. Doing some rough throughput testing from macOS over multi-channel SMB yields throughput rates that are barely faster than the built-in 10 Gb copper NICs on the Mac.
Using iperf I can confirm that I can get near enough to 25 Gb/s raw network throughput on the Mac. And other non-macOS systems see significantly faster throughput to the same NAS. I am not sure exactly what the issue is that causes 25 Gb NICs to underperform so significantly for file sharing tasks, but I am reasonably certain that the issue is in macOS.
Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
#114I predict the next generation of Studio’s will have a 25 Gbps upgrade option built-in.
Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I'm using the sonnet at work. I initially read this as SONET [1] and was seriously questioning your technical choices. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_optical_networking
hey. hey. not everyone’s on board with this packet switching fad, buster. what a man does in his own homelab, even if it does involve ATM, is none of our business.
ATM was packet switched :) SDH was circuit based.
Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
#116Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
hey. hey. not everyone’s on board with this packet switching fad, buster. what a man does in his own homelab, even if it does involve ATM, is none of our business.
ATM was packet switched :) SDH was circuit based.
I don’t want to split hairs here, but you started it … :)
It was 53-byte “cell” switched, but used virtual circuits as a path through the network. The data plane had no globally routable address in the cell header. I don’t think most people considered it a “packet” network, and being an ITU standard it definitely belonged on that incumbent, connection-oriented, telco side side of the protocol wars.
Whatever anyway, it was weird.
Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I'm using the sonnet at work. I initially read this as SONET [1] and was seriously questioning your technical choices. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_optical_networking
I've seen some very old cubicle setups that had two strands of 62.5/125 multimode (OM1) pulled to each desk for a FDDI connection. Very costly in its era.
You don't say.
That rang some bells, working in a communal data-centre, serving all of town, and smaller neighbouring towns. At 100Mb/s. Funny thing was the town still used many terminals in its offices. Serial Siemens terminals, speaking to Siemens RM400, RM600 and something called BS2000, also by Siemens. Of course with baudrates, parity, even/odd, start&stop bits nobody else would have used. Because Siemens...
So how do you connect them? By using adapters not much bigger than a matchbox, somehow powered by the serial port! At insane prices per piece, more than the terminal itself.
Shrug? Vee arr government, vee don't need to care about zat!1!!
(Town is broke by now, btw.)
Similar things in all police stations of that state.
(Many more towns, counties, cities broke there, too.)
Reasoning for using FDDI was that there existed equipment (by Allied Telesis IIRC) which could detect someone messing with the fibre somewhere, out of sight.
Not that much later, in the German HQ of some larger insurance company, I had the privilige of playing with FDDI at 1Gb/s. And witness the oh so unbreakable IBM S390(or was it still 370 at the time?) go down hard, several times...
Hrrm. What else did I witness? Oh, some Compaq thing made for a rack, 4 units high, sitting on a desk without cover, making you feel like you'd be in a vacuumer, or right next to an airport. Whooooouuuuiiiiieeeehissssss!
That thing ran Novell Netware, responsible for every login from any client across all offices in town. Handled by a full-length ISA-Card, full eight bits wide! Not 16. Not using the EISA-slots...(facepalm)
Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
ATM was packet switched :) SDH was circuit based.
I don’t want to split hairs here, but you started it … :) It was 53-byte “cell” switched, but used virtual circuits as a path through the network. The data plane had no globally routable address in the cell header. I don’t think most people considered it a “packet” network, and being an ITU standard it definitely belonged on that incumbent, connection-oriented, telco side side of the protocol wars. Whatever anyway, i…
You're right. I oversimplified.
However when I worked with SDH it was particularly popular because some customers like banks vetoed ATM because they were incredibly worried one of their packets would make its way to a third party. At that time encryption was not yet commonplace. I always thought that risk was a bit overblown but they were adamant.
SDH was more like a software switched multiplexing (where the previous generation PDH had this in hardware). And it was not exposed to the customer, they just got a symmetric feed of 2mbps or a multiple thereof.
Still, technically the same could happen if we configured it wrong. But for some reason the banks were less worried about it.
But yes it was not packet by packet switched no. I have to admit my knowledge of ATM was never the best as I worked exclusively on the SDH network.
Re: Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd suspect that (from Apple's perspective) any form of file sharing (other than iCloud) is now considered 'extremely niche.' If they were focused on the needs of the kind of person who moves enough terabytes of files around to need this kind of speed, we'd see them still making either computers with slots, or first-party 25Gbps networking. I'm not really trying to criticize them for it -- Tim Cook's bean counters cl…
Might their professionals market segment (designers, video editors, 3d artists, and so on) still be using thunderbolt and LAN storage? This was the case ~7 years ago when I worked adjacent to these sorts of users. Video files are huge and expensive in time and money to transit with cloud storage providers.
I'm sure they are, but there just aren't that many of them. When you include only real professional "Hollywood" people plus the elite tier of YouTubers who can easily afford to drop $10,000 on a computer (The 'Mac Pro' target market, in other words) we're talking about a tiny niche to Apple. Both within the "Mac" segment, and even more so when compared to the company's overall portfolio that includes iPhone.
So, it seems that Tim Cook decided at some point that while it's nice to make $5,000 in profit from a Mac Pro sale every day or two (okay, I kid, I'm sure they sell a bit more than 365 a year), even if they hang those "pros" out to dry completely and they defect to Windows, Apple would be better off spending their time focusing on ways to make the MacBook Air and Neo more attractive or profitable because they move orders of magnitude more units of those.
Note: I don't like this, but my feelings have nothing to do with it, I think it's just a classic Tim Cook Numbers-first business decision