Q: Where are the thunderbolt HDD enclosures and other peripherals ?
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Apr 25, 2012 3:49 PMby Casemon,Scratch the above about inertia building...
Just heard back from CalDigit and while their twitter feed says they've released T1 & T2, have confirmed they're not available for sale until June AND they're only selling them WITH DISKS INCLUDED.
T1
SSD 480GB- $999
T2
SSD 960GB- $1899
Have to ask myself: what's the point of creating an enclosure that supports 3.5" disks if you can only buy it with pricey 2.5" SSD disks?
Might be useful to some, but to me, this is just more thunderbolt lameness. Ugh.
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Apr 26, 2012 12:34 PMby tirerim,OWC has announced SSDs on PCIe cards, which could be combined with a Thunderbolt PCI enclosure once those are available to have a Thunderbolt SSD. Pricey, but they claim to offer faster speeds than SATA can support, and they have some relatively small options.
120 GB - $360
240 GB - $510? (Available in May)
480 GB - $930
960 GB - $2,096
They seem to be taking orders now, so it looks like they're actually shipping.
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Apr 26, 2012 2:19 PMby sbywalt,Thanks for the additional information. This will be useful for some users.
At the risk of seeming to be beating a dead horse, has anyone, since the beginning of this thread, figured out why inexpensive empty Thunderbolt enclosures are not unavailable (or even expensive ones)? Alternatively, if these are, in fact, being sold, who is selling them?
Some users might be looking for empty Thunderbolt enclosures that can be populated with the drives of their choice (for example, a couple of the least expensive SSDs that they can find for use in a RAID level 0 volume)? I know that even empty Thunderbolt enclosures might be a bit expensive. However, empty enclosures would still allow us to save a bit of money by allowing us to shop around for less expensive SSDs (or to use SSDs that we already own) which can be used to populate an empty Thunderbolt enclosure to create a very fast Thunderbolt RAID level 0 volume.
When I visit the OWC website and search by typing in "thunderbolt," I see nothing but very expensive Pegasus "storage solutions." At least at OWC, there are no options that would allow users to save money with an empty Thunderbolt enclosure the same way that users can save money by buying empty SATA or SCSI enclosures.
Does anyone out there know why no one is selling empty Thunderbolt enclosures by now? Maybe there is a good answer to this question, but I presently can't understand why no one is offering such enclosures when they could be so useful to so many users.
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Apr 26, 2012 4:42 PMby Casemon,@sbywalt
Sadly no, there are yet no barebones / empty Thunderbolt enclosures for sale +1yr after anouncing Thunderbolt.
The reasons for this have been less than forthcoming, but the general consensus seems to be down to either that manufacturers:
a) have invested a lot in developing products based on Thunderbolt tech, and wish to (irrationally) recoup that investment straight off with their early offerings, and so forcefully include (relatively cheap) disks as a means of increasing perceived value / charging higher prices.
or
b) have found the Thunderbolt tech to be very particular to hardware variances, such they they can only get desired performance results if they lock down which disks are used.
Given the relative uniformity of hard disks these days, believe the reason is closer to the former.
In either case, think it is simply manufacturers not seeing the forest from the trees. Part of why words like "stillborne" and "vaporware" are being thrown around in reference to TB storage.
To say, by all measure, the first manufacturer to sell a quality empty Thunderbolt enclosure (JBOD is a must!) will likely dominate that market segment, for a little while anyway.
Myself, have 9TB just waiting to be "bolted to thunder" but alas, no empty TB JBOD RAID enclosures exist! Right now, I basically feel like this:
But no one seems to have the 'balls' to get this rolling *ahem*
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May 8, 2012 5:25 PMby Casemon,Is SonnetTech pulling out of Thunderbolt enclosure solutions after announcing 1yr ago and still no product?
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/thunderbolt/index.html
The above page used to have a panel describing their D800TBR5 and E400TBR5 Thunderbolt enclosures; now the English site makes absolutely no mention of any Thunderbolt enclosure products, despite announcing them over 1 year ago
http://www.sonnettech.com/news/pr2011/pr041111_thunderbolt.html
Japanese site still has the old design with the announced TB enclosures:
http://www.sonnettech.com/jp/product/thunderbolt/index.html (click 4th tab from left)
Seems Sonnettech, one of the early promisers of TB multi-bay storage enclosures, is no longer going down the Thunderbolt enclosure road... who's next?
ugh... tired of waiting!
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Jun 8, 2012 5:39 PMby Casemon,QNAP just announced a 4-bay JBOD Thunderbolt enclosure, the JTB-400 woot!
Drive bays are hot swappable and can accommodate both 2.5" and 3.5" form factors and with no hardware RAID controllers (Marvell is on SATA duty internally).
The JTB-400's release is set for sometime in the next quarter.
AnandTech's serving up the news:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5956/qnaps-jtb400-a-byod-4bay-thunderbolt-enclosur e
(reading the comments, happy to see am not the only one waiting to pair this up with some ZFS goodness!)
From all the pictures, the JTB-400 is ugly as sin, but unlike Sonnet and all the others manufacturers who make TB HDD enclosure promises then don't deliver, believe QNAP has the chops to actually release this soon!
At last, some good TB news!
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Jul 6, 2012 10:47 AMby Alex403,I have also been looking for one when I get the rMBP and the buffalo ministation seems to be the best best, regardless of the higher price tag. I found it on Newegg for the retail price:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822165478
Has anyone used this product yet? Especially on the rMBP or 2012 MBA? I am interested to see if it consumes too much power, even works at all, and how fast it really is on TB and USB3.
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Jul 6, 2012 8:26 PMby Treatment,Here's interesting news about the cables, and cost of the cables potentially coming down.
No direct link, but at the moment it is on the front page of http://www.macrumors.com/
