[PLUG-TALK] A computer for external storage?
Aaron Burt
aaron at bavariati.org
Thu Oct 1 14:59:45 UTC 2020
On 2020-09-30 17:16, John Jason Jordan wrote:
<snip>
> I need my four drives to be in a RAID0 array, and to appear as external
> storage via Thunderbolt 3 on my Thinkpad. So I could just buy a
> motherboard with a TB3 port, put it in a cheap case, stick one of the
> four-port cards in it, and mount the drives in the drive cage. Of
> course, I'd need a CPU and some RAM, but the total could come to under
> $1000. And that's about how much the enclosure I was trying to buy
> costs. Plus, I could get the parts in a few days.
>
> The problem that I can't figure out is what will happen when I connect
> a TB3 cable from my Thinkpad to the motherboard in the new computer? My
> intuition tells me that it would never work. Or I might end up with a
> pile of smoking U.2 drives.
That is a fun and educational problem to research. From what I can tell,
the answer is "no damage would occur, but it won't do what you want."
Starting with Thunderbolt: It's not ummm...gendered. The cables cross
everything over, so you can safely connect a computer to another
computer, or a device to another device just as safely as a computer to
a device. While it can use up to 18 Volts, a cross-connection won't
lead to burnination.
You can connect computers over Thunderbolt for networking. Linux (and
Windows) support Apple's ThunderboltIP protocol so you can have a 10Gbps
connection without any extra hardware.
However, you want the computer to act like a disk, or in jargon, for
Linux to act as a SCSI target over the Thunderbolt 3 fabric. The
Linux-IO Target (LIO) can do that over several other fabrics such as
FireWire or Ethernet, but not Thunderbolt.
Confusingly, Apple devices support "target mode" over Lightning, but
it's a proprietary thing that nobody else can talk to.
I don't know what you'll be doing with your
Lamborghini-crossed-with-a-Mack-truck storage array, but if the
immediate gathering/processing work can be done on a server instead of
on your ThinkPad, you could build a little tower server for now and move
the SSDs to a TB device later.
Also, hello! I'm so glad that you're sounding well and I hope we get to
talk in person again some day soon.
Regards,
Aaron
More information about the PLUG-talk
mailing list