Q: Where are the thunderbolt HDD enclosures and other peripherals ?
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Mar 6, 2012 2:48 AMby Casemon,Latest news from Promise Tech. from CeBit show 2 days ago, announces new Thunderbolt JBOD enclosure the Pegasus J4 for use only with 2.5" notebook drives (Seriously? WTH!?).
Pegasus J4 The Pegasus J4 JBOD is the latest addition to the PROMISE line of award winning Thunderbolt-enabled storage devices designed for media and entertainment professionals, providing the flexibility of on location or in suite storage and management capabilities for their highly valued digital assets. The J4 provides outstanding expansion capabilities by leveraging either traditional HDDs or the latest generation of SSD’s. PROMISE Pegasus J4 is the world’s first 4-bay NON-RAID JBOD featuring a stylish portable compact enclosure designed to unleash the raw power of Thunderbolt technology. Thunderbolt technology is a new, high-speed, dual protocol I/O technology designed for performance, simplicity, and flexibility.
Highlights of the Pegasus J4:
- Slick portable Small Form Factor (SFF)
- High Performance JBOD (Just a bunch of Disks)
- Supports 2.5” HDD or SSD
- Daisy-chainable (example: connect to Pegasus R Series)
- Compatible with MAC OS X RAID Solution (Disk Utility)
No word on pricing or availability [SIGH]... http://www.promise.com/news_room/news.aspx?m=615®ion=en-US&rsn=928
Also recently, Sonnetech showed their long-promised-never-delivered D800TBRX line-up at BVE 2012 show in London.
Both announced Thunderbolt JBOD RAID solutions over 1 year ago and STILL NO PRODUCTS TO BUY.
So by the time actual products are available, some new better tech will be out and the value investment in switching to Thunderbolt will be wasted?
This is lame.
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Mar 19, 2012 3:40 PMby sbywalt,Amen to this brother! This is all that I am looking for:
(1) An approximate date of delivery; and
(2) a decision by someone ... ANYONE ... to deliver EMPTY, reasonably priced Thunderbolt enclosures.
(3) My plan would be to populate these enclosures with as many SSD's as possible, or, if the price of the enclosures make it too expensive to buy more than one, then to populate that one with two of the largest, fastest, SSD's that I can afford. Actually, it is not how many I can afford. I could, in fact, buy multiple Thunderbolt drives and populate them with many SSD's. But this last part of my plan involves the all important WAF ("Wife Acceptance Factor").
I could live without silly extravagances like a car, a home, and food, for example. My way of looking at things is, one should build the fastest Mac possible, with as many blazingly fast external RAID Level 0 arrays as possible (and, of course, irrespective of any actual need for these devices).
Why do I want them? Because they are there! My wife, on the other hand, insists on silly practical things like a residence, a dependable food supply, medical care, transportation and all sorts of silly things.
Have I brethren out there in Cyberland? Is there anyone else whose main motive in using the Thunderbolt port is BECAUSE IT IS THERE? Is there anyone else out there who is bothered by preposterous questions like, "do you actually need one RAID Level 0 array, much less three?"
Or, are you bothered by the ludicrous proposition that some contributors put forth that "for the same amount of money I need to spend in order to create such an array, I would need to spend to create a RAID Level 0 SSD Thunderbolt volume, I could buy a new car! What an absurd question. After all, what Mac addict worth his salt would want some silly 700 hp Lamborghini instead of his smoking Mac with several smokin RAID Level 0 arrays.
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Mar 21, 2012 2:53 AMby Scorpii,This is an FYI
Lacie have released, or soon will, an external thunderbolt hub that will take 2 esata cables. It looks like one of their ext hds, but apparently its only has the esata and Thunderbolt interfaces in it.Details on the Lacie website.
For those of use with esata drives this could be a stepping stone for thunderbolt; although it will probably max out speed at esata's top transfer rate.
Scorpii.
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Mar 23, 2012 10:01 PMby tirerim,Lacie have released, or soon will, an external thunderbolt hub that will take 2 esata cables. It looks like one of their ext hds, but apparently its only has the esata and Thunderbolt interfaces in it.Details on the Lacie website.
For those of use with esata drives this could be a stepping stone for thunderbolt; although it will probably max out speed at esata's top transfer rate.
Given that any drive you connect it to is going to be using SATA, which has the same limits as eSATA, that max isn't going to create any additional bottlenecks.
I couldn't find any evidence of it being available yet; all the references I found were to the announcement at CES in January, and just said "Q1 2012" for availability. Q1 is almost over, with no sign yet, but hopefully soon.
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Mar 26, 2012 3:25 PMby TroyEU,take a look at this, it may work for some of you
http://www.elgato.com/elgato/int/mainmenu/products/ThunderboltSSD.en.html
you can buy it on amazon
Message was edited by: TroyEU
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Apr 3, 2012 10:55 PMby Casemon,Latest Press Release from Promise Tech on Thunderbolt support showcased at next week's NAB2012 show in Las Vegas, USA:
My favorite bit:
"Until today, PROMISE is the only company to have devoted themselves to developing and bringing to market an entire line of Thunderbolt technology enabled storage to cover RAID and JBOD needs for both the Mac and Windows platforms."
Me: "WOW Really? Let's see your best Thunderbolt JBOD solution!? "
"Oh wait, let's see ANY Thunderbolt JBOD solution!?"
haha
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Apr 6, 2012 1:03 PMby sbywalt,Well, this Thunderbolt to eSATA connection is not the ultimate solution, and it will deliver nothing better than eSATA speed, but it is certainly way, way better than nothing. Ever since the black day I needed to finally say goodbye to my ever-faithful G5, I struggled with the decision as to whether my upgrade would be to a MacPro, or to an iMac (which, obviously, would not really be an upgrade in every respect).
After looking at the substantially enhanced speed of the iMac line (or, at least some versions of it), and looking at the substantially increased prices of the MacPro line, I made the painful decision to switch from my previous tower Mac preference (9500, G4, G5), and buy my very first iMac. In most regards, I have been pleasantly surprised. My 27" iMac i7 (3.4 GHz with 16 MB of RAM, and 256 SSD + 2 TB 2nd internal drive) generally works well for me.
However, left over from my beloved G5, I still have this eSATA (3 Gigabit) RAID Level 0 volume uselessly lying around (4x500MB, with each of the four 7200 RPM drives having its own SATA connection). So, I have a two TB volume of previously useful drive space currently doing nothing. With this new device (descibed in the previous poster's link), at least I can reactivate this RAID level 0 volume.
Of course, what would be even nicer would be empty Thunderbolt enclosures that users could populate with drives of their own choosing (like, for example, multiple SSD's that could be configured into a RAID level 0 volume that could take advantage of the full Thunderbolt potential - or at least something close to that potential). But then, I guess paying for two, or four SSD's of reasonable size would be a different issue which would bring up all sorts of cost/benefit arguments.
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Apr 24, 2012 5:42 PMby Casemon,Ok, looks like a small amount of intertia is building here...
Latest entries in the announced-but-not-yet-available-for-purchase line (ugh) of Thunderbolt HDD enclosures was announced by CalDigit at NAB2012 a few days ago.
They showcased their T1 & T2 single & dual Thunderbolt enclosures:
http://www.caldigit.com/Thunderbolt/T1T2.html#T1
T2 dual disk looks promising for it's stated JBOD and dual 3.5" & 2.5" SSD support!
They even have their own iOS & MacOS app for managing performance stats and configuration.
Full PR announcment here (among other sources):
http://www.jigsawbroadcast.com/news/nab-2012-news-caldigit-announce-t1-t2-thunde rbolt-drives
No mention of release date yet... SIGH
