I just bought my second Drobo 5D. It is attached to a 2014 (black can) Mac Pro. At present I’ve daisy chained it to the first Drobo 5D and that works fine, but I wonder if I would get better performance when using both Drobos at the same time if I connected the second 5D directly to a different port on the Mac. I’ve got two open ports at present.
Would using a second thunderbolt port give better bandwidth for data transfers? Under what circumstances would the offer a noticeable improvement over daisy chaining two or more 5D’s?
The new MacPro has TB2 ports, the 5D only has TB ports. It would take multiple (my guess is 4+) 5D’s to saturate one of the TB2 ports.
Thanks. However, when transferring data, the TB port of the 5D is effectively a bottleneck. I was wondering if when copying data from one 5D to the other daisy chaining them might limit the data transfer speed. I guess I could do some experimenting, but I was hoping someone else already had.
Some benchmarks with something like Blackmagic or AJA would be great.
I think you are going to find that the Drobo’s can’t saturate the single TB channel. TB provides 10Gbit/sec (1.25GB/sec). I’ve never had a 5D exceed 200MB/sec, so it would appear there is plenty of room on the TB channel.
It’s a good point about the 5D-to-5D potentially being a bottleneck. I have had an on-going issue with the TB chipset in my 5D. I was using it as a monitor pass-thru with my Mac Mini, but kept getting artifacts on the screen.
THANK YOU. That was just the information I was looking for. Based on that, daisy chaining two or more Drobos to a single TB port shouldn’t be an issue. Thanks again.