As I linked here, I found a bunch of Atto Thunderlink units for sale on ebay. There are old Fiber Channel controller boxes to be used with FC SAN storage being sold without the SAN controllers. They are very cheap, making them about as expensive a GDC Beast setup, but they are Thunderbolt1 enclosures, which made them interesting enough to buy and try.

Earlier today, ebay notified me that the package has arrived, and indeed the Thunderlink was awaiting me when I got home. I immediately set to work.

The victim system in this case is my Lenovo T430s, and I am going to try various connectivity options via the Thunderlink PCB. At least initially, the results are not very promising as I am seeing weird behavior out of the setup.

But first, some photos.

This is what the Atto Thunderlink looks like. It is about the same size as an AKiTiO Thunder2/3. The rear bracket has room for two fiber-optic modules, but not for a regular PCIe card bracket:

Here is the power brick, a 12V, 5A, 60W power supply with a center-positive barrel plug. The barrel plug dimensions are the same as the AKiTiO Thunder2, at 2.5x5.5mm:

Opening the unit up (which requires the removal of a single screw at the bottom), it looks like a proto-Thunder2 PCIe box, with a 40mm fan up front. Note how high the PCIe slot sits, which means that a full-sized card cannot fit in this box. If I had to guess, this was intentional, so that people did not swap cards in these units. Either that, or the FC card that was installed was aligned to the front fan (but it is not like the fan couldn't been placed lower...):

The rear panel can be easily removed once six phillips screws and a nut holding the barrel plug socket are removed, allowing for a low-profile video card to fit while the box is closed with the rear panel removed. Note the two Thunderbolt ports and the power barrel-plug on the rear panel:

So what is this board, you ask, and which Thunderbolt controller it uses? Well, that is a very interesting question, since searching for L145IA03 or Z145I001L comes up empty. Looking up the list of Intel Thunderbolt controllers, the only one launched in 2010 is the very first one, of the Light Ridge generation, known as the CV82524EFL. Since no other Thunderbolt controllers were in existence in 2010, this is likely it. The package size of 15mm x 15mm also seems to match up, as does the number of ports. This is one OLD controller! The board itself has few identifying marks, but states it is a "mLogic LLC. mLink". Searching for this leads me to here and here. Looking in the user guide, the board seems identical to what I have. Apparently, this is the same PCB as was used in the mLogic mLink Thunderbolt to PCIe adapters.

It has a fan header for the front panel fan, and next to the PCIe slot is a strange 4-pin connector which was not connected to anything in the box. I do not know what it does. Here is what it looks like:

The PCB itself is exactly the same height as a low profile card placed into it, which is probably by design. The card connected is an HD7570:

Next up: Let's power this thing up and see what it does...