Recommend Thunderbolt 2 to eSata/USB adapter

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Recommend Thunderbolt 2 to eSata/USB adapter

Postby nekton34 » Wed Apr 06, 2016 12:12 am

I'm having slow Finder problems with two raidz disk enclosures connected to a late 2014 macmini (10.11.4/16 GB/512 GB SSD/core i7) via USB3. The problems seems to go away when either one of the raidz enclosures is connected to one USB3 port and Apple's thoughts are that the two raidz are saturating the bus. Can anyone here recommend a Thunderbolt 2 to eSata or USB3 adapter that works without panics—there has been a oldish thread on panics and TB2 adapters but it petered out. Did anyone find a panic-free adapter solution other than move the disk arrays to Thunderbolt2 cabinets? if so, what brand?
TIA
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Re: Recommend Thunderbolt 2 to eSata/USB adapter

Postby nekton34 » Wed Apr 06, 2016 11:50 pm

Fixed the Finder hangs and slow folder population with Lundman's help. Thanks, thanks and thanks again Lundman.
A spindump showed some problems with zfs and .Trashes. We cleaned all the .Trashes out using terminal and then also changed the physical connection for one of the array enclosures (master) from USB3 to Thunderbolt-to-eSata using a Kanex adapter. The backup enclosure was left on USB3. The change in speed at the next restart was instantaneous. Like the difference between a Porsche and a bicycle. My client's users are thrilled not to need to go make a cup of coffee while the folders are populating.
I can get some sleep too.
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Re: Recommend Thunderbolt 2 to eSata/USB adapter

Postby Brendon » Thu Apr 07, 2016 12:03 am

@nekton34

A small hint, please change just one thing at a time. The question now arises, was it the trashes or the kanex...? I'll bet the later but it would be good to know.

Cheers
Brendon
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Re: Recommend Thunderbolt 2 to eSata/USB adapter

Postby nekton34 » Thu Apr 07, 2016 12:56 am

I did. Cleaning the .Trashes stopped the Finder hangs in a 2-hour test period when I would have expected to see them occurring several times. But the Finder folder population speed was only mildly better according to the users; changing the I/F increased the speed too. Although this array is lightly used in an office you'd be surprised by how much flak the users give me when it is down for testing and they can't use it. It was a case of test and deploy asap for the sake of my sanity. Ideally, I'd have spent 48 hours on each stage but a Japanese office is not an ideal test environment.
I've managed to persuade the bean counters to shell out for a pure TB2 JBOD array enclosure too (which is what I requested 12 months ago but they wouldn't pay for). The time spent on this issue convinced them the cost is worth it.
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Re: Recommend Thunderbolt 2 to eSata/USB adapter

Postby Brendon » Thu Apr 07, 2016 1:42 am

Ah, good thanks for the update.

Cheers
Brendon
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Re: Recommend Thunderbolt 2 to eSata/USB adapter

Postby nekton34 » Mon Apr 25, 2016 10:37 pm

At the time of the slow I/O on USB3 and the Finder pauses and hangs, I sent a BR to Apple documenting the problem and included some sysdiagnose reports. They came back today saying this is a known bug in 10.11.4 and has been reported by others. Nothing more than that, so maybe they are working on a fix in 10.11.5.
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Re: Recommend Thunderbolt 2 to eSata/USB adapter

Postby haer22 » Sun May 01, 2016 1:45 pm

I have a Akitio Thunder Dock (https://www.akitio.com/adapters/thunder-dock) connected to my miniMac. The dock gives me 2*eSata, 2*USB3 and a FW800. When I bought my third cabinet I had to buy another Thunder dock to be able to connect the cabinet via eSata.

I am a very happy camper.

nekton34 wrote:Can anyone here recommend a Thunderbolt 2 to eSata or USB3 adapter that works without panics—there has been a oldish thread on panics and TB2 adapters but it petered out. Did anyone find a panic-free adapter solution other than move the disk arrays to Thunderbolt2 cabinets? if so, what brand?
TIA
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Re: Recommend Thunderbolt 2 to eSata/USB adapter

Postby incumbent » Tue Jul 05, 2016 8:31 am

I'm using a CalDigit Thunderbolt Station 2 [1] on my Hackintosh workstation [2] and have had great results with both USB 3 and eSATA using that guy. All of the storage-relevant connectoids work great for me. I wish it had Firewire of any flavor but the IO break-out on the TS2 was great for my purposes otherwise (gigabit ethernet/audio/etc). And, I like CalDigit's hardware in general.

I'll end up buying a Thunderbolt to Firewire 800 gizmo sometime soon. I've exhausted the PCI lanes on my workstation and can't add another PCI card without giving up Thunderbolt or my GPU, which isn't happening.

[1]: http://www.caldigit.com/thunderboltstation2/
[2]: I'm using an Asus Z97 Gryphon with the Asus Thunderbolt 2 single-port PCI-E card
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Re: Recommend Thunderbolt 2 to eSata/USB adapter

Postby s_mcleod » Fri Sep 23, 2016 2:48 pm

I just bought one of these this week, I haven't tried it yet though - https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboard-Acc ... rboltEX-3/
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