Port Multiplication: Sonnet Fusion 400 vs 500P

I spend a lot of time on the Bare Feats website. I really appreciate what Rob has done and the tests he performs. Sometimes I have a little trouble interpreting his results, but maybe that's just me. Anyhow he has done some tests of 500 GB drives and the new PCIe SATA controller from Sonnet. Can anyone give me a feel as to the performance differences in some real world setups. Assuming using the same drives (a 500 GB WD or Hitachi for instance)how will perfomance compare:
Internal controller SATA I vs Sonnet SATA II controller and a single drive in a Fusion 400 enclosure.
A single drive in a Fusion 400 vs a single drive in a 500P.
Raid 0 in a full Fusion 400 vs a full 500P.

Anyhow he has done some tests of 500 GB drives and
the new PCIe SATA controller from Sonnet. Can anyone
give me a feel as to the performance differences in
some real world setups. Assuming using the same
drives (a 500 GB WD or Hitachi for instance)how will
perfomance compare:
The WD 500 will perform faster than the Hitachi 500 in single drive uses whether it is installed in the PowerMac G5 dual-core internal bay or in a Fusion 500P port multiplier enclosure.
A 5 drive SATA PM enclosure will provide about 200MB/sec
performance using an E4P and a dual-core or Quad PowerMac G5. 10 drives will provide about 400MB/sec and so on. You can see very detailed performance charts and comparisons in the AMUG Sonnet E4P review found here:
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/sonnet/e4p/
Internal controller SATA I vs Sonnet SATA II
controller and a single drive in a Fusion 400
enclosure.
No SATA I controllers exist for the Dual-core Qual except the internal PowerMac G5 interface. All PCIe SATA cards are SATA II. SATA II cards will perform a little faster but typically within 5% difference for an individual drive.
A single drive in a Fusion 400 vs a single drive in a
500P.
Raid 0 in a full Fusion 400 vs a full 500P.
A single drive in a Fusion 400 direct connect enclosure will perform at about the same speed as the same drive in a Fusion 500P.
The limitation of SATA PM is the sharing of a single cable for all data. Typically, writes are limited to 200MB/sec on a PCIe PowerMac and 227MB/sec on a PCI-X PowerMac.
A four drive Fusion 400 can do 270MB/sec using Maxtor SATA II hard drives. A 500P SATA PM solution will provide about 20-25% less speed when empty but will provide nice performance when full.
You might also want to see the AMUG Addonics 5X1 eSATA review as these PM enclosures perform about the same. Both of them use the Silicon Image 3726 PM chip.
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/addonics/5x1/
Between these two articles you will find plenty of details to answer your questions.
Hope this helps,
Michael

Similar Messages

PCIe eSATA Sonnet + Fusion 500p

I am planning on getting the Sonnet e4P SATA card and the Fusion 500p expansion enclosure. I like the features of the enclosure and quietness. However i am aware that going direct connect is typically faster than using Port Multiplication when the drives are <80% full. Is anyone using this rig and is anyone getting it to run direct connected in any way ?

Hate to bump this, i will let it wither if no responses.

2 Filled Sonnet Fusion 500P enclosures; RAID 0/1, or RAID 5?

I currently have a Sonnet Fusion 500P loaded with 5 WD 500GB RE2 drives; all running individually and not RAIDed; this box is connected to a Sonnet Tempo E2P in my MacPro.
I'm interested in getting a 2nd identical enclosure and drives, and creating a RAID system using 10 drives. I also plan on upgrading the E2P to the E4P, since it will provide increased RAID performance that the E2P does not.
I've been reading the various posts on RAID on these forums, and also have looked through the AMUG articles and reviews, and I have a couple of questions.
First, can I stripe the 5 drives in each enclosure, and then mirror the two enclosures? This RAID setup will be used for Final Cut Pro capture and editing, and also for DVD Studio Pro files. Basically, I would have 2.5TB of high speed storage, and a duplicate of that.
Second question-can I do this with Disk Utility, or would I need additional software/hardware to accomplish it?
And finally, I'm a little vague about RAID 5 setups, but would it be better to create a RAID 5 with one enclosure and 5 drives, using 4 for storage and one for parity information? From my limited knowledge of this, I think that if the RAID 5 failed, it could be rebuilt using the info on the 5th drive? Is this correct?
What would be the best way to go here, taking into account the hardware I already have? If I'm off base, I'm open to suggestions for a different setup that would have comparable storage space, speed, and backup.
Thanks for any advice anyone can give.

Dear Mike,
It sounds like you want more RAID capabilities than Disk Utility can easily provide. Since you are looking for a new host adapter card anyway, you might as well get one that can provide RAID 0, 1, 5 and 1/0. I would suggest the HighPoint RocketRAID 2314 if you want to stay with individual eSATA cables. The AMUG review can be found here:
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/highpoint/2314/
If you would rather have a card with a single cable and do not mind purchasing an extra cable, I really like the HighPoint RocketRAID 2314MS which is the same card with a different cable system. Here is that AMUG review and a link to the cable you would need:
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/highpoint/2314ms/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000JQ51CM/arizomacinusergr
The Sonnet E4P is a good card but it cannot support RAID 5, 10 or 50 and the HighPoint cards can.
The HighPoint cards also provide just as good or better performance with a 10 drive SATA PM configuration like the one you are considering.
It sounds like the main reason for the second SATA PM enclosure is mainly backup. Please understand that a RAID 5, 10 or 50 configuration adds redundancy to your hard disk array but it is not a guarantee that you will recover from directory corruption or user errors. If the directory is corrupted on a RAID 10 it can easily write the same corrupted data on the mirror copy of the drive.
If you truly want a backup, I would consider using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner at the end of each day to backup the work on the first SATA PM RAID to the RAID in the 2nd SATA PM enclosure. Having your backup off-line when not in use is the best way to be ensure the backup data will be intact when you need it.
Have fun!

New, larger drives for Sonnet Fusion RAIDs

Hello-
I got some great advice here a couple of years ago in regards to building my two 5-drive RAID systems with Sonnet Fusion 500Ps and WD RE2 500GB enterprise drives. They have performed flawlessly, and I've never had a single glitch. (They are connected to my 2006 MacPro and are used almost exclusively for video capture).
Now, however, I'm in need of more storage; I want to either add a 3rd enclosure (I'm considering the FirmTek SeriTek 5-bay enclosure) or replace the 500GB drives I have with larger ones. Perhaps eventually I'll do both; I have a Sonnet E4P with two SATA ports still available.
Either way, I'm looking for larger drive recommendations for these boxes. I use a striped RAID 1 configuration for the 500Ps I have, and then backup/clone one box to the other.
I've been considering the WD 1.0TB Caviar Black Enterprise drives, but I might want to go with 1.5TB drives, such as the Seagate 7200.11. The price on these is right, but I've heard that early versions of this model had problems in RAID configurations; it's also not a 5 yr. warranty/enterprise class drive.
Any suggestions? I got valuable help last time from mbean and hatter; perhaps they will contribute again, but I'd appreciate any advice I can get before purchasing 10 new drives, or 5 additional drives and a new enclosure.

Thanks for the reply and the recommendation. The Samsung is pretty new; I wonder how reliable it is. MacSales (OWC) has a Samsung 1TB model HD103UJ (The U replaces the S) and it is more expensive.
Hi,
The Samsung F1 HD103UJ is the older model. AMUG has 18 of these that were used in RAID tests for the last year. They are a great HD - but for blazing speed the new Samsung F3 model HD103SJ is the next replacement and about 20% faster.
I have never found "Enterprise" hard disks worth the extra money. The reason is that most standard hard disks will reliably last 3 years and the enterprise versions are almost never faster than the standard version they were developed from. After 3 years all of my hard disks are ancient technology.
Three years ago the hot hard drive to own was a 300GB with 65MB/sec performance. We thought that was great. Now its in the junk heap or delegated to backup duty on a notebook
Hard disk technology is increasing much faster than most of us can keep up with and prices are very reasonable for new 1TB hard disks. Sure there will be a few buyers who think they need to pay the 2TB premium but most users will wait until these hard disks are under $130.
Buying hard disks at premium prices can be painful especially when you realize that a new set will probably be required every 3 years.
Have fun!

Setting Up Dual Sonnet Fusion/WD RE2 RAID 0 Arrays in Disk Utility

I've just received my 2nd Sonnet Fusion 500P enclosure, 5 500GB WD RE2s, and the Sonnet Tempo E4P card. See this earlier thread for more info:
[http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6034612&#6034612]
I assembled everything with no trouble; drives into trays, trays into the enclosure, card into the Mac Pro, etc.; all went well.
Next, in Disk Utility I initialized the 5 drives, and set up a striped RAID O array. I used the largest RAID block size of 256K. And again, everything worked perfectly; I now have a 2.3 TB RAID setup mounted on my desktop.
Next, I created 2 folders on the RAID, one for all of my Final Cut Pro media files, and another for all my DVD Studio Pro media files. These files are currently stored on the individual (not RAIDed) drives in my first Sonnet Fusion enclosure. I'm now in the process of copying over all of the files to the new RAID.
When that's finished, my plan is this: I will shut down, and power down the original Sonnet enclosure. When I start up again, one by one, I will open up my FCP and DVDSP projects (the project files themselves are stored on my internal boot drive, and backed up to another internal drive) and when the media can't be found, I'll reconnect the project to the media on the RAID.
If this all goes well, I will then erase the individual drives in the first enclosure, and build a 2nd RAID 0; I'll copy/clone everything from the first RAID enclosure to the 2nd.
If you're still reading, does this sound like a safe way to do things? I want to reconnect everything while I still have 2 copies of all of the media files; once I have the 2nd RAID built, and everything is copied back to it, I'll have a backup of everything again. If there is a better, more secure way to do it, I'm open to suggestions.
And being somewhat new to RAID, one more question I have is, are drives in a RAID system more prone to failure than if they are running as stand-alone drives? I've used the WD RE2s a lot, and I like them; they seem very reliable. (I now have 14 of them, in total). But does the RAID system itself put the drives more at risk?
Thanks to those with the patience to read through this, and hopefully offer some advice.

Always have two backups or sets of data. If you are going to erase one set... then for a stretch of time you only have the one good copy I take it? I guess the originals would be one good set, so you are safe.
You realize you can unmount drives connected on Sonnet controllers, right? No need to shutdown your computer, just the enclosure(s). Couldn't tell if that is what you said anyway.
I don't use internal drives for backups, just external SATA and at least one on FireWire. One backup is always off line at any time. And enough juice on the UPS to carry me through what I am doing or can safely get past.
I just read one of AMUG/michael's post on a controller that supports hardware RAID and ability to map out bad sectors "on the fly" which is about the only time I worry about a failure. That, and UPS, and beware of OS patches and updates (one security update affected SeriTek on some G4/5s).
I'd say you've done a lot for being new to RAID - and using the same make/model/revision for all your drives helps a lot. Buying together, and having at least one 'spare' if one fails, is also good insurance.
Some poeple use 4 drives in a 5-drive enclosure. For heat and ventilation and because sometimes it might be ideal for performance. Never used or seen the 500P up close but I suspect it is well built.
You could build a 2nd 500P and either increase performance or capacity or use 2nd as backup. If you don't need to copy 1GB per minute, then a concatenated RAID fills drive A before putting data on B and is more secure than a stripped RAID but still shows up as one large volume.

SATA Port Multiplication?

Hey there,
I've got an XServe G5 cluster node that's not being used and I was thinking about making it our new file server. Naturally, there's only room for the single ADM.
Having a look inside, though, I noticed that there's still three SATA connectors on the motherboard, just like the mainstream XServe G5. So I started thinking: wouldn't it be neat if I could connect an eSATA box with a port multiplier to these ports?
I know, I know, I could do the same thing only better (ie: less hax0ry) if I just bought an XServe RAID. But I work at a small business with a small budget.
So the million dollar question is: do the internal SATA controllers on a G5 XServe support port multiplication?

So the million dollar question is: do the internal SATA controllers on a G5 XServe support port multiplication?
I have no idea whether the internal ports support port multiplication, but if all you want to do is add a couple of drives, why not just look at either an external FireWire enclosure or an eSATA card and a SATA enclosure.
Both options would be cheaper than an XServe RAID and avoid the issue of hacking the hardware.

Are there suggestions for managing Multiple VMWare Fusion systems sharing files with a MacBook? Suppose I have enough ram for 3 servers to share files.

Suppose I have enough ram for 2 or three VMWare fusion systems to that could benefit from file sharing. Is it possible to configiure each VMWare funsion instance to have a common read only file share on my desktop and a common read/write area on on my desktop?
This would allow me to extend the power and mustle of my Mac Book Air, Retina Display system to its best advantage. Whether native Mac processing or speciality linux or Windows systems as needed.
I am having trouble allowing more than one system to share the same read only and the same read/write areas so that software does the file locking and merge controls. Even if these do not share a common read/write area, it would be truly handy for drive space management for them to share a common read only area.
Thanks for your thoughtful input.
20 year IT Professional that loves Mac visual interfaces, outstanding performance and a *nix command line.
Don

It really denpends on the os running in the vm and what the permissions are set to on those shares.
I run a few vms on both a mac at home and windows at work and all other computers in my home or at work can connect to the vms without any problems. Even multiple computer at the same time.
It also depends on how you have set the vm up for networking. If you are setting it up as nat, instead of bridged, that can also cause problems access it from multiple system. With nat the vm is on its own network branch.

Using the firewire 800 port for my firewire 400 devices

I will be purchasing, at long last, a new mac mini to replace my faithful and well behaved G4 mac mini. I have a 20" cinema display and an external firewire 400 backup drive with the same form factor that sits below the mini. I would like to continue to use these peripherals as well as my video camera DV out. Ideally, it would be cool to have a FW800 hub that had both 800 and 400 places to plug my peripherals, but I don't see that available. Should I get a hub and adaptors for the fw400 components I want to add, or use the hard drive with an adaptor to the mini, then use the FWports on the drive for the monitor, and whatever else I want, thereby using the drive as a hub...
Any advice to this ignorant question would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Paul

Since Firewire 400 devices still operate at Firewire 400 speeds regardless of whether or not they are connected by adapter to Firewire 800 ports, the best thing to do is just get a Firewire 800 to 400 adapter, and attach it to a Firewire 400 hub known to be able to do all the functions you desire.
Note, migrating to Intel Macs from PowerPC Macs is not as easy as the Migration Assistant, as this user tip explains:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=435350&tstart=0

1 port multiple connections?

Is it possible to have multiple connections on the same port using labview. I was looking at the TCP Listen VI help and it states the following...
TCP Listen Details
When a listen on a given port begins, you cannot use another TCP Listen VI to listen on the same port. For example, if a VI has two TCP Listen VIs on its block diagram and you start a listen on port 2222 with the first TCP Listen VI, you cannot listen on port 2222 with the second TCP Listen VI.
if (typeof(writeVarRefs)=="function"){writeVarRefs("647");} if(typeof(lvrthelp647) != "undefined"){document.writeln(lvrthelp647)} if(typeof(lvfpga647) != "undefined"){document.writeln(lvfpga647)} if(typeof(lvemb647) != "undefined"){document.writeln(lvemb647)} if(typeof(lvpdahelp647) != "undefined"){document.writeln(lvpdahelp647)} if(typeof(lvtpchelp647) != "undefined"){document.writeln(lvtpchelp647)} if(typeof(lvblackfin647) != "undefined"){document.writeln(lvblackfin647)} if(typeof(lvdsp647) != "undefined"){document.writeln(lvdsp647)}
1. So if the TCP Listen VI cannot do this, is there a different VI that can?
2. If there is no VI for this purpose, is there some way to handle this using Labview?

You need to spawn the tasks that service the connection when a client connects to the server. The client can be anywhere on the network and the server doesn't spawn it. However, when the client establishes a connection with the server the server will spawn a task to service that connection.
This method would use dynamic calls to start the tasks for the client processing. This would allow the server to service any number of connections. Though in your case knowing where to pass messages could get a bit tricky.
Think of a web server. It sits on port 80. At any time their can be multiple clients connected to it. Each time a connection is made at the server it spawns a task to service the connection and goes back to listening for new connections.
Mark Yedinak
"Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?"
Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald - Gordon Lightfoot

Uncompres10bit HD w/ Sonnet Fusion D500P

anyone using 2 Fusion D500P enclosures raid together at raid0 to get 10bitHD capture & playback? I have 2 of those connect to sonnet 4ep sata card (**** caldigit ran out of their card so I have to use sonnet).
anyhow, raid 2 boxes together at raid0 doesn't work for me. I'm using the seagate enterprise 1TB drives (10 of them) but somehow during capture or Render long sequence the boxes just goes offline.
so, I raid only 1 box w/ 5drives & it can capture proRES(HQ) HD but sometimes the boxes goes offline too but better than 2 boxes together. I thought more is better but not. Called sonnet & they said it has to do w/the drives not the box so i'm thinking of swaping the new drives from owc.
any suggestion? can't afford their D800P box. trying to cut corner here.
J

Drives went offline would be caused by:
1. hard drive.
2. sonnet e4p driver.
3. your system or FCP.
4. Unreliable software RAID setting.
I am not sure if one fusion d500p with sonnet e4p can handle 10bit uncompress? it's slower than the requirement and not sustained.
Getting 2 fusion d500p and sonnet card and 10 drives and dealing with software stripe through disk utility is no fun at all, with the same price tag with no significant additional costs, you actually can buy just one single Caldigit HDOne or cheaper & smaller HDelement to do 10bitHD capture & playback, and they are all hardware RAID so more reliable than os stripe.

Multiple Cold Fusion Instances

Can you run multiple instances of cold fusion using cold fusion standard?

Hi
Welcome to Adobe ColdFusion forums . Multiple instance is a feature of Adobe ColdFusion Enterprise. So you will not be able to achieve the same in Standard Edition.
http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-family/buying-guide.html
For development purpose, install CF 10 as trial which will act as Enterprise Edition for 30 days. After 30 days, CF 10 will become Developer edition and you can continue your development.
HTH
Thanks
VJ

Need connector from firewire 400 to USB 2 port

got a new i-book and want to use my old ext hardrive firewire 400 for backup.
Is there a cable that connects the new i-book USB port to the firewire 400 ext hard drive so I can use the old external hard drive as backup?
Or am I screwed?

Doesn't the FireWire port on the iBook work?
Or are you mistaken about what you have? Is it a MacBook you have instead of an iBook?
If it is a 2010 Mac, it would be a MacBook, and, yes, it would not have a FireWire port.
External USB drives are fairly inexpensive. That would be the route I'd take.
The MacBook Bluetooth, USB, FireWire, RAM (MacBook) forum can be found here:
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1170

FireWire 400 to FireWire 800

I have just purchased an iMac which has only one FireWire 800 outlet. I have three external HDs which are compatible w FireWire 400 outlets only. Is there a way for me to be able to use these HDs with this new machine? Is there a wire that would allow me to use HDs w FireWire 400 outlets on this iMac?
Any thoughts on this would be most appreciated.

Yes this is very common and there is a simple solution, you just need a Firewire 800 to 400 converter such as this:
http://www.amazon.com/Sonnet-FireWire-400-Adapter-FAD-824/dp/B0000CDJPQ/ref=sr11?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1253141288&sr=8-1
or
http://www.amazon.com/FireWire-6-pin-Cable-9pin-6pin/dp/B0027DPM1U/ref=sr14?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1253141418&sr=8-4
From there you can daisy chain your Firewire devices together. Your external HD's will need 2 FW plugs on each drive (one in and one out) if they don't have this then you will need to purchase a Firewire Hub such as:
http://www.amazon.com/IOGEAR-GUH420-Port-USB-Fire/dp/B0007RB28U/ref=sr16?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1253141533&sr=1-6
Regards,
Roger

HT3913 Dealing with the lack of Firewire400 ports. . .

I just had to replace my ’06 iMac with a Lion capable iMac. Brought her home this evening. However, the new machine has just one Firewire 800 port and NO FW 400 ports!!!!!
Problem is:
I have 3 external drives;
DiskGo Edge has 2 FW400 ports
Fantom Drive has 2 FW 400 ports
LACIE has one FW 400 and 2 FW800 ports.
Do you think I could daisy chain them through the LACIE? Do I need to contact the individual companies, Apple? Or just put them all together and turn the whole thing on??? If I could daisy chain, I might still use some of my other peripherals. . . . .

Just get fw400 to fw800 cables (6pin to 9 pin) to connect the fw400 to your fw800 imac port.
And you should be able to daisy chain them.
Here's all of monoprice.com's firewire cables. 6-pin cables are for fw400 and 9-pin cables are for fw800.
If you already have a bunch of fw400 cables lying around then you can just get a fw800-fw400 adapter instead of a cable.
Moshi 800 to 400 FireWire Adapter
Sonnet FireWire 400 to 800 Adapter (FAD-824)
But the cable is cheaper.

Firewire 400 external device on an MacBoook Pro Firewire 800

I have an external Hard drive a generic 120GB hard drive with a standard Firewire 400 port. I used it as an HFS drive with periodic backups to and from my old Powerbook G4 10.4 before the logic board died. Drive worked 1 month prior to the Powerbook's death.
I purchased a new Macbook i5 10.6.4, a much needed upgrade. Since it has a Firewire 800 port I purchased a 400 to 800 adapter from an online retailer. Once I plugged in the new firewire addapter the drive showed up as expected as a /Volume/Backup112.ZF. However the beach-ball of death showed and I could not read the drive. Terminal I could cd to the volume, but not list. In Terminal Testdisk application (Mentioned later) was able to list disk information as well as diskutil. The firewire would not unmount cleanly. Pulling out the connector only gave a message that drive was not unmounted cleanly and remained mounted... sudo diskutil unmount /Volume/Backup112.ZF did not work. Kill and restart of Finder only crashed the computer. Computer works great and after a hard reboot.
Multiple tries to get a error log got me nowhere. I could post disk information, but that would only show that the drive has read but not write permissions.. I did find multiple postings about using a 10.5 OFirewireSerialBusProtocolTransport.kext. I do not have a 10.5 disk to get the file off to download. http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2136580
There seems to be an indication that Apple knows about the problem? Is there a developers forum where I could read what they are saying on the fix? I have an apple One Account, would it help to get in touch with the advanced staff? I have not seen any firewire problems like this in Unix. Are there any Unix people out there well versed in Firewire? Otherwise, Looks like I will be doing more research...
FYI:
NTFS read/write without software install. This works perfectly in 10.5-10.6 without any issues for my Windows to Mac drive. Too many people make it more difficult then it needs to be. To figure it out, just needed to know Unix.
1. NTFS auto-load read and write enable
sudo mv /sbin/mount_ntfs /sbin/mount_ntfs.orig
vi /sbin/mount_ntfs
#!/bin/sh
/sbin/mount_ntfs.orig -o rw "$@"
sudo chmod 755 mount_ntfs*
sudo chown root:wheel mount_ntfs*
2. NTFS boot sector fix
TestDisk from http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk.

Well, at least I know that everything SHOULD be working as it did briefly this evening. I'm at a dead end . . .can't think of anything else to try.
Guess I'll just have to pick up another adapter tomorrow and see if that helps.

Port Multiplication: Sonnet Fusion 400 vs 500P

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