Cheap Thunderbolt eSATA solution

You can go out and spend $179 on a LaCie eSATA Thunderbolt hub or make your own with various parts for under $55-$100. I was able to jury-rig a $3.50 micro male SATA to eSATA cable with the Seagate Thunderbolt docks to make a working Thunderbolt - eSATA solution.

I used both the STAE129 Desktop Adapter (reviewed here on this blog) and the portable STAE121 Go-Flex adapter (also reviewed here on this blog). Both can be bought, heavily discounted at the Direct Seagate Store. They often go on sale for $50 and $100.

All I needed was a special cable that is $3.50 on Amazon. It is basically a male micro SATA to eSATA cable. In short, a portable set-up can cost as low as $60.

In order to use this, you will need to break the two retaining clips on both sides. It goes in one way since it is a L-shape connector. Since you are using eSATA, you won't need the power from the SATA connector.

Voila. Thats it!

And guess what, OS X reports it as a port multiplier. I don't know if that is true or not but that is what is reported. This means you can hook this up to those cheap $80 4 bay JBOD RAID enclosures.

I connected to both the portable and desktop Seagate Thunderbolt adapters.
Performance wise, you will hit 3 Gbps SATA.

I connected them twice to the SansDigital TOWERRAID TR4UTBPN 4 bay RAID enclosure.

For a 9TB spinning RAID 5, this is not bad. See the benchmark below.

So there you have it. A cheap make-shift solution. I make no guarantees. You can fry something up. If you don't feel safe with this, you can always go and buy the La Cie for $179-199.


Link:
http://www.amazon.com/Micro-SATA-Cables-eSATA-Inches/dp/B002P6W8E8/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1384560580

Motorola Lapdock 100 just in.

I just got a Motorola LapDock 100 in. These were discontinued and I didn't do my research too well. Apparently, the original Atrix Lapdock is the one to get with the larger screen and ease-of-hack to convert them into portable monitors. There is very little documentation and mix-messages on the newer Lapdock 100.

Well, I'll find out in a few days if the LapDock 100 is as easy to improvise as the original Atrix Lapdock.

If you are not tuned-in on what these do, let me explain. A few years ago Motorola made these expensive (think $500) add-on phone accessories that turned their Atrix phones into netbooks. It was way ahead of its time and flopped and these have been in the discount bins. They have micro-usb and micro-hdmi connectors. And with the original Atrix lapdock, you can buy some adapter cables and turned them into dummy portable monitors with attached keyboard/trackpads. Many people have connected Android sticks and Raspberry PIs into pseudo ARM laptops. I just want to use them as a portable extra monitor with keyboard/mouse for the bench.

Unlike the original Atrix dock, the Lapdock 100 has a universal cable with Micro USB male and Micro HDMI-D male. There are some confusion whether or not they are locked to newer Motorola phones with some sort of authentication. I will find out shortly once my adapter converter cables come in.

Here are some you tube videos to illustrate what can be done with the original lapdock (and potentially the newer one).

and

Update: Here is my updated report.