Motherboard supporting thunderbolt

[echo87]

Hi!

Long time lurker. Amazing forum and I think I'm gonna need a raise at work to since I want all your systems...

I'm thinking about building my own fileserver, a 24 hot-swap chassi from like Xcase, but the thing is that I live in a mac household. Therefore, I've been looking at thunderbolt compatible motherboards, but I don't really understand how they work and I don't seem to google it very well.

My question is: how does thunderbolt on a motherboard work with a mac? Do I just connect a thunderbolt cable between my mac and the server and it just shows up at DAS? Does anyone know?

Thanks in advance!

/Andreas

 

[echo87]

Sorry, if this is the wrong forum, please move or lock my thread

 

[TangoWhiskey9]

Hi Andreas,

That is not exactly how it works. You will need a thunderbolt to SAS or SATA interface. What I have seen people do is get a Thunderbolt to PCIe adapter. Put in an external PCIe card (or two) such as a LSI 9201-16e and then use standard SATA or SAS to connect the drives.

I do not think you can currently get a motherboard with Thunderbolt support and use that although Tunderbolt networking (for Macs) has been around since 10.9?

If you did do this, I guess you will need to make a hackintosh Mac Pro in the 24-bay DAS, setup all of the drives in some sort of shared storage in OSX and hope the Thunderbolt networking would work.

You would be better off in the long run getting Thunderbolt to 10GbE adapters and making a standard 10GbE NAS/ SAN appliance. It would be cheaper than anything else and when you want to share all of the storage on the 24 bay with other machines, it's easier to have it all on 10Gb.