And What happen if you wire both ports together on the same PC?.. Do you get a broadcast (thunder) storm?
Thunderbolt was also expensive, which is why adoption was limited, but it's becoming more maisntream since Intel and Apple have been pushing it in the last years, adn piggibacking over USB-C makes it an easy sell comapred to requireing a separate connector like firewire.
Still, thunderbolt peripherals are way more expensive than USB ones, so like Firewire before, use is still more in the enthusianst/professional space.
Compared to Gigabit Ethernet back in that time period? Firewire was a huge bargain.
Completely loading a 5 Gig iPod with music over that first version of Firewire still took a few minutes.
Yes and? At what price points? What was the adoption rate? How many mainstream PCs and peripherals worldwide had it?
Wherever you went, whoever you met, you were way more likely to find a USB or ethernet port to hook up for a fast transfer rather than Firewire.
At least in my country at the time, maybe you lived in Cupertino/Palo Alto where evryone had iMacs and firewire.
Just like VHS over Betamax, USB won because it was cheaper and more convenient despite technically inferior to firewire and consumer tewch at the time was a race to the bottom in terms of price.
>Completely loading a 5 Gig iPod with music over that first version of Firewire still took a few minutes.
Only the first gen iPod had firewire before switching to USB, and even then, what was the point of Firewire 400 on it when the tiny and slow mechanical HDD on it was the real bottleneck.
There was no way the iPod would have been remotely as successful had it stayed on firewire. Apple didn't have the market sahre back then to enforce their own less popular standard. Only when it switched to USB and supporting PCs did the iPod really take off.
At the time, USB was still limited to 12 megabits per second and transferring that same 5 Gigs of MP3 files would have taken over an hour. The firewire iPod did it in a couple of minutes.
USB was cheaper, but dog slow.
Gigabit Ethernet was faster but WAY more expensive.
Again, only the first gen iPod was firewire exclusive and it was not yet a maisntream product since it was still Mac only, so avergae consumer demand at home computers for Firewire was lackluster and the iPod didn't change that.
Firewire was niche or non existent in the home PC space and it died completley with the launch of USB 2.0 remaining alive only in the pro-sumer space.
>Gigabit Ethernet was faster but WAY more expensive.
Please show me where I mentioned Gigabit ethernet as an argument. I said 100 Ethernet which was dirt cheap and almost every PC and Mac had it, as opposed to Firewire, so if you needed a fast cross platform transfer it was your best bet at the time in terms of cost and mass availability over firewire before USB 2.0 and gigabit hit the market.
Which completely ignores the speed and the costs of the various data transfer standards as they existed at the time.
The cheap 1.2 megabit USB standard that existed at the time couldn't transfer 5 Gigs of MP3 files in less than an hour.
The cheaper 10 megabit version of Ethernet they sold at the time also would need more than a hour to transfer enough MP3 files to fill an iPod and wouldn't have been cheaper than a Firewire port.
Ethernet with faster speeds than 400 megabit Firewire existed, but was MUCH more expensive.
Speed AND cost both matter.
> I said 100 Ethernet which was dirt cheap
Back then? It wasn't.
FireWire at 800Mbps beat Gigabit Ethernet in terms of latency for a rather hard real-time system.
The low cost is price. Asus for example with their ASUS ThunderboltEX 4 allows you to have TB4 via PCIe card.
The neat thing about USB4 was same as PATA and later SATA: widely and relatively cheap available in consumer hardware. SCSI and FireWire were technically superior but were neither cheap nor widely available.
Oh and I don't know about SCSI but FireWire was actually a security risk.
Luckily there are good alternatives. I landed on a solution using a Belkin[0] DisplayPort and USB to Thunderbolt-cable. I just get USB2.0 speeds, but it's enough for my needs. I'm also able to extend it using an active DisplayPort 1.4 extender, for a total of 10 meters cable.
[0] https://www.belkin.com/support-article/?articleNum=316883
In terms of scaling this to multiple hosts as the author does, I've read that it is possible to daisy chain, or even use a hub, but it doesn't strike me as the most reliable way to build a network. For an ad hoc connection, though (like null modem cables of yore), it's a great option.
As far as points of failure, there's no additional hub/switch in between the devices, so you have a Thunderbolt controller on each device, two cables, and two ports. If a cable goes bad, so long as there isn't a silent/awkward failure mode, all three nodes can still talk to eachother, at degraded speed. If a switch goes bad, the whole network is down, unless you start talking about redundant switch topologies.
To your point though, there does seem to be plenty of shenanigans with performance, especially between devices with different Thunderbolt controllers, that may make this less ideal. But IMO, that's more of a question of do you want to with a more battle tested topology, or are you okay with a less battle tested, but still highly performant and "simple" (we won't go into how bonkers the USB/Thunderbolt spec is) topology?
10 Gbps doesn't come close.
Of course this example is still interesting and cool.
It seems 25Gb dual port Mellanox CX-4 cards can be found on eBay for about $50. The cables will be a bit pricey. If not doing back to back, the switch will probably be very pricey.
Each lane of PCIe Gen 3 can deliver 985 MB/s [2], meaning the typical drive that uses 4 lanes would max out at 3.9 GB/s. Surely there is some PCIe/NVMe overhead, but 3.5 GB/s is achievable if the drive is fast enough. There are many examples of Gen 4 drives that deliver over 7 GB/s.
Supposing NVMe-oF is used, the MVMe protocol overhead over Ethernet and PCIe will be similar.
1. https://enterprise-support.nvidia.com/s/article/roce-v2-cons...
https://www.ebay.com/itm/273064154224
And yep, they do apparently work ok if you're running Linux. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOIXtsjJMYE
Haven't seen info about how much noise they generate though, so not sure if suitable homelab material. :/
Cheap though... it's a small fraction of the price for a new one.
Are there better options around?
Looking at Ebay just now, I'm seeing some Mellanox IB switches around the same price point. Those things are probably super noisy though, and IB means more mucking around (needing an ethernet gateway for my use case).
With the caveat being that's only if you're not up for adding PCIe cards.
If you are ok with adding some PCIe cards, then you can transfer things a lot faster than 1GB/s. :)
They're widely used (with many different types) in IT data centres, home labs, and probably other places too.
Heaps of them are on Ebay. As a random search just now for "Mellanox 25GbE" on US Ebay:
* https://www.ebay.com/itm/134435757546
* https://www.ebay.com/itm/355348422765
(there are hundreds of individual results)
Searching for "Mellanox 50GbE":
* https://www.ebay.com/itm/225021493021
* https://www.ebay.com/itm/233915360659
(less results)
There are older generation ones too, doing 40GbE:
* https://www.ebay.com/itm/305046322527
* https://www.ebay.com/itm/166350081025
(hundreds of results again)
With those older generation cards, some care is needed depending upon the OS being run. If you're using Linux you should be fine.
If you're running some other OS though (eg ESXi) then they might have dropped out of the "supported list" for the OS and not have their drivers included.
---
Oh, if you have even a hobby grade CNC machine around, you can get a fairly professional level result:
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/3d-printab...
Do you know if this is the case for all thunderbolt generations (speed differences aside)? Does it apply to thunderbolt using mini DisplayPort too or only over USB PHY?
https://www.gigabyte.com/Press/News/1140 this doesn't mention it and the Intel whitepaper specifically requires TB2 so I would guess TB2 was it.
It should've been PCIe 2.0 x1 and then 3.0 x1. There was absolutely no reason not to do it: PCIe 2.0 came out in January 2007, USB 3.0 came out in November 2008. PCIe 3.0 followed in November 2010 and 10gbps over the USB C connector didn't appear until August 2014.
What USB4 version 2.0 can only do with a complex tunneling architecture we could get "straight": PCIe 5.0 x1 can do 32gbps which closely matches the 40gbps lane speed defined in USB4 version 2.0 (which again came out years after PCIe 5.0 mind you). It would require two lanes, one for RX one for TX and the other two lanes could carry UHBR20 data for display, for a total of 40gbps. This very closely resembles the 80gbps bus speed of USB4 version 2.0 but the architecture is vastly simpler.
We wouldn't have needed dubious quality separate USB-to-SATA then USB-to-Ethernet etc adapters. External 10GbE would be ubiqutious instead of barely existing and expensive. Similarly, eGPUs would not need to be a niche and DisplayLink simply wouldn't exist because it wouldn't need to exist and the world would be a better place for it. You could just run a very low wattage very simple but real GPU instead. Say, the SM750 is like 2W.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMEL2AM/A/thunderbolt-3-u...
Nice one Apple. I think I'll buy this, a cable and a cheap tb3 dock.
A literal loopback interface? Two of them, most likely.
OK but what then? I've had ethernet ports on my computers since I can remember, and that hasn't magically allowed me to transfer data back and forth just by plugging a patch cable into both machines. What software is at work here?
When you connect a patch cable directly (no crossover cable needed in the 21st century), you'll likely find that each system has a self-assigned IP in the 169.254 network.
I have two identical machines that I need to do this with... lemme test it and see.
...
ARGs usb-3... so nopes. (How FN lame is that)