CalDigit Thunderbolt Station 2

Started by scratch17, January 31, 2015, 03:19:09 PM

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scratch17

On Thursday I received a Caldigit Thunderbolt Station 2. I like it so much that I thought I'd let forum members know about it before I've fully utilized its capabilities. This has proven to be the best upgrade I've ever made to my iMac.

The TB Station 2 is a Thunderbolt 2 hub with 3 USB 3.0 ports (5 Gigabits per second), 2 eSATA ports (6Gigabits per second), GB Ethernet, audio in and out and one HDMI port. It has two Thunderbolt ports so it can be daisy chained. I found it to be totally plug and play. It has great build quality and can be oriented on its side or vertically.

So far I've simply connected all of my hard drives via the new USB 3 bus that the Caldigit has provided. I haven't yet utilized the 1 TB Samsung 840EVO SSD that I plan to use as a boot drive for my mid 2011 iMac.

These are first impressions. I'll report on the performance upgrade I get once I've moved to the Samsung SSD.

I have over 32TB (8 x 3 + 2 X 4) of Seagate USB 3 external drives connected. Previously, I was only able to connect them through the iMac's USB 2 interface, using two USB hubs. Of course, the hubs were connected to the Mac's hub. This created terrible bottlenecks and resulted in demonstrably lower productivity across the board.

It used to take me about 8 hours to transfer half a terabyte from one drive to another. Last night I transferred 670 GB from one drive to another in 1 1/2 hours. 

I'm using a 10 port Vantech USB 3 hub connected to one of the TB Station2 rear USB 3 ports to connect the external drives. I have a SIIG 3 port USB 3 /4 port USB2 hub connected to the second port on the rear of the TB Station2. It has two LG Blu Ray burners on the USB 3 bus and my scanner and printer on the USB 2 bus.

So far I've not tried to really stress things. I plan to try burning a Blu Ray movie from a file on a hard drive, while extracting a hundred GB RAR file, and transferring  a 50 GB file to a USB thumb drive from one of my other hard drives. My iMac is Thunderbolt 1. It's bandwidth is 10 Gigabits per second both ways. The TB Station 2 has twice that throughput, but scales back to TB 1 spec.

I have been lusting after some way to use an SSD as my boot / main drive on my iMac since I bought it. I considered having Microcenter (Apple certified repair / upgrade) install a Samsung 500 GB drive in 2013. Their tech department came back with the bad news that my motherboard would not work with third party SSDs.

Then I heard about the Sonnet Echo 15 Pro + Thunderbolt dock. It seemed like the perfect answer. I waited patiently for its release. I saw the "shipping status update" dated Jan 22 /14. It said the company had delayed release so that Thunderbolt 2 could be used. Release date was now summer of 2104. It's now 1 /2015 and no Sonnet product.

So now I have the TB Station2 and a 1 meter thunderbolt cable. It cost me $204 shipped. I saved a few dollars by pre-ordering in December 2014. It's $224 with the 1 meter Thunderbolt cable on their web site now.

I'll probably try the eSATA bus with the SSD. I have a Sans Digital enclosure. I have it connected and it sits empty on my desktop. I want to do a complete clean install of OSX 10.10.2. I'll use Super Duper to clone the bare OS and then install all of my software.
Hamer Duotone, Brian Moore i213, Taylor 710 BCE 

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pasha811

Thanks for sharing.
Wait for your comments on the external boot.

Best
Pasha
Listen to my music at :  http://alonetone.com/pasha/

scratch17

After some consternation I found out from Caldigit that they have a known issue with booting Yosemite through the Thunderbolt Station 2. They are working on a fix. Apparently this  function works with Mavericks but I'm having a problem getting Mavericks installed.

The tech support at Caldigit was fast to respond and they immediately acknowledged the problem. I'm too busy create a bootable thumb drive with Mavericks right now so I won't report anything further for a while.
Hamer Duotone, Brian Moore i213, Taylor 710 BCE 

VG-99, FC-300, RMC Fanout
RJM Mastermind GT10
Kemper Profiling Amp
Radial JDV Mk3, X-Amp
Mesa Recto Pre + 20/20
68 Fender Bandmaster (AB763)
Marshal AS80R

UA Apollo X6, Twin X, Logic Pro, Luna, Melodyne Studio

scratch17

An Apple Genius and I were able to load Mavericks onto the SSD. It took some work. More than it should have.

Even after the OS was loaded, and startup disk was set to the drive, it hung upon restart. We disconnected the Thunderbolt hub and connected the SSD via FireWire 800. It booted fine, but was slow, of course.

However, doing this interim step must have done the trick because after reconnecting the drive by eSATA though the hub, the iMac boots fine off of the SSD.

It boots in a few seconds, compared to a few minutes. I haven't had a chance to do anything with the new configuration and I'll be out of town for a week so I won't post a performance report for a while.

I can say I think (as does the Apple tech I worked with) that I have a workaround that will even let me install Yosemite and boot off the SSD. I plan to test it next week with another SSD I have.
Hamer Duotone, Brian Moore i213, Taylor 710 BCE 

VG-99, FC-300, RMC Fanout
RJM Mastermind GT10
Kemper Profiling Amp
Radial JDV Mk3, X-Amp
Mesa Recto Pre + 20/20
68 Fender Bandmaster (AB763)
Marshal AS80R

UA Apollo X6, Twin X, Logic Pro, Luna, Melodyne Studio

Elantric

#4
Thanks for the update on your progress with the CalDigit Thunderbolt Station 2!

http://www.caldigit.com/support.asp

https://www.facebook.com/CalDigitStorage


Another review of CalDigit Thunderbolt Station 2
http://www.tekrevue.com/caldigit-thunderbolt-station-2-review/


myself i went with the OWC Thunderdock 2

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/Dock/OWC/Thunderbolt2-Dock/