Hi,
I have a very capable Macbook Pro M2 with tons of ram but not enough HDD.
I want to somehow use the very capable Thunderbolt-4 in it to provide high bandwidth connection to my NAS which is a P520 with a TrueNAS Raid-Z2, NVME m2 pool. P520 has Tb3 support.
I run inference on multiple AI models at home and need to load models fast from the NAS to my M2 Pro. Some of these models and their data are easily 40-80 GB. I would very much like to use my NVME pool that can give me 8-10 GB/s throughput of pure I/O and load these models in a few seconds.
At the moment I can get upto 20Gbpe using ethernet over thunderbolt ↔ thunderbolt.
How can I go higher? I am a noob here, but i believe I might need to expand my TB to a PCIe enclosure and then buy 2 NICs. One NIC in the enclosure and one in the Nas unit. Is that correct? What hardware would I need to go beyond 20Gbpe?
TB3/4 is only a 40Gb interface. Overhead will exist, and you shouldn’t expect a full 40 gigabit. Much of that is reserved for monitors and USB, and wouldn’t be available via PCI-E. So you’re likely chasing a very small improvement.
2,5 GB/s is a pretty solid result. That being said, which protocol are you using? SMB enforces syncwrites with macOS: disabling them might give your better performance at a price.
Are the Mellanox cards supported by TrueNAS; You mentioned they won’t work out of the box. Do I need to compile kernel modules and load them to work? Any caveats or pointers here?
Context: I think I might have access to one of the Dell 071C1T and an expansion chassis in a couple of weeks, and I want to at least try and see if they work to boost their speed.
And I meant more in context of MacOS drivers, as referenced in that Reddit post, there was no Kext for Mellanox cards, meaning there was no driver as of that post. You’d have to do more research.
and as I said, based on the fact that Thunderbolt reserves at least half of it’s bandwidth for other peripherals, you’ll likely end up spending a good chunk of money with little benefit over your current solution.
