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  • DanNeely - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    Were there any issues with video quality/reliability in your daisy chaining test?

    I'm guessing not since you didn't come close to saturating the bus in this test, but I'd be really interested in seeing what happens if you ever get to play with something like a 10bay SSD enclosure and external GPU that could devour most of the bandwidth for what ever they're running.
  • ganeshts - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    The DisplayPort lanes are muxed together with the PCIe lanes, and, if any throttling were to happen, it would be on the PCIe lanes, and not the DisplayPort ones.

    But, yes, we were way short of saturating the link because we were not equipped properly to test that aspect.
  • DanNeely - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    Ok. I didn't know the DP lanes were given explicit preference in the MUXing; but I suppose that in general it's probably the right way to go.
  • repoman27 - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    I just wanted to clarify that Thunderbolt supports multiple signaling modes over a single port via hardware muxing, however, when operating in Thunderbolt signaling mode, it uses protocol converters and crossbar switches to mux at the packet level. So the Thunderbolt mode is more like iSCSI or other technologies that encapsulate and transport data streams over IP networks alongside other packets. The encapsulation that Thunderbolt performs is incredibly lightweight, though, and Intel even refers to it as a "meta protocol".

    Thunderbolt seems to have fairly solid mechanisms in place for guaranteeing timely delivery of packets that are part of isochronous data streams such as DisplayPort. OG Thunderbolt did have some issues with USB audio adapters, as it had no way of knowing that the PCIe packets destined for the USB host controller in the device were particularly time sensitive.

    Bear in mind that the signaling rate of a Thunderbolt PHY is considerably higher than the versions of PCIe or DisplayPort that it's carrying. Also, it can strip out all the bit-stuffing that is normally used to maintain a constant DisplayPort data rate and just send the packets carrying actual data. Or it can essentially bit-stuff with PCIe packets instead.

    And one last niggle, Thunderbolt cables are really nothing like regular DisplayPort cables aside from sharing the miniDP connector. They're active and have four full-duplex signaling lanes, whereas DP cables are generally passive and only support half-duplex lanes for the main link.
  • DanNeely - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link

    You say USB Audio was a problem with the original generation, does that mean it's not a problem in the 2nd/3rd generation? If so, how was it fixed: Throwing more bandwidth at the problem, or by doing usb packet inspection to ID and prioritize the usb audio stream?

    Also, am I right in assuming a TB dock with audio out would be using a built in usb audio device?
  • repoman27 - Saturday, April 16, 2016 - link

    Here's Anand's description of the original problem: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4832/the-apple-thund...

    Honestly, I have no idea if the issue with the Promise Pegasus R6 drives (one of the very first Thunderbolt devices to make it to market) was ever fully resolved. In the meantime, Apple has released updates to their EFI, Thunderbolt host, device and cable firmware (yup, even the cables have firmware), and USB host controller and audio device drivers. If I had to guess, making the USB host controller / audio device drivers Thunderbolt aware and capable of isochronous bandwidth reservation (a la FireWire) might have solved the problem. However, Anand's conclusions about the root cause are different than mine, so I could be way off base.

    And yes, AFAIK Thunderbolt docks all use USB devices in some form or another for audio I/O.
  • danbob999 - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    "the street price of $378 sounds reasonable"

    Sorry but no, a hard drive case is not worth $378. Wake me up when it cost less than $30.
  • NCM - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    On the off chance that you're just ignorant, not a troll, I'll point out that it's not a "hard drive case." This enclosure holds two drives, it provides a selection of hardware RAID options, and it has very high speed connectivity via Thunderbolt 3. It's also one of the first products of of it kind. Each one of those things adds cost.

    Yes it's not cheap, but this kind of product will become less expensive over time. For comparison purposes we have a bunch of 2.5" drive RAID enclosures at the office that run about $270 each (empty), see http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/882789-REG/C...
  • danbob999 - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    This is a 2x3.5" case. It's too bulky to be useful for 2.5" SSDs. It's too expensive and no faster and a plain USB3 case when you put two 3.5" HDDs.
    I wasn't trolling, I seriously don't see any use case for it. The fact that it needs a fan to operate just make it worse.
  • Guspaz - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    Can you point out a 2x3.5" USB 3 hard drive enclosure with hardware RAID support for under $30? I get that you think $378 is too much, but $30 seems far more unreasonable a price than $378.
  • name99 - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    There is obviously a market for this sort of thing for SOME people, but if you're trying to save money, the way you do it is to use standard (high-performance) USB-3 cases and software RAID-1; there's no need to do that in the case.
    OSX and Linux obviously support RAID out of the box; I've no idea about Windows but I'd assume they're also on board. The only reason I can see that you need this hidden behind HW is if you need to move the device between different OS's.
  • danbob999 - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link

    well there is this one for $50:
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9S...

    if you don't need a real case there are various dual dock for about $30. I also found dual 2.5" USB3 cases for $25.
  • Great_Scott - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    At $100 over the price of a normal enclosure, no one that really needs the extra features this offers will care. Thus the item will stay niche and the price will stay high.

    This is self-reinforcing problem.

    TB is putting up a good fight, but the future doesn't look bright. No interface has ever survived higher prices by having better features. See: Microchannel, Token Ring, EISA, ATM, e-SATA and, yes, FireWire.
  • epobirs - Saturday, April 16, 2016 - link

    Look at the Cineraid portable models. I picked up one from Newegg a couple of years ago for about $20 because the things weren't selling. Either the target market didn't know they existed or just didn't see the value. Mine still sits unpopulated because I don't have any great need for a somewhat faster USB 3.0 drive, unless I'm getting the drives really cheap. At the time I bought the unit I was getting a lot of requests for laptop SSD upgrades. The customers would either get their original hard put in an enclosure or just let me keep it for a token amount. (I'd label it and put it in a drawer for a month or so, in case the SSD proved defective.)

    I expected I'd have a couple of drives to use or sell it to somebody converting two laptops but neither situation came along since obtaining the Cineraid.
  • HideOut - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    The good news for us is that you will be asleep until hell freezes over. No more trolling from you.
  • danbob999 - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    At $378 I might as well buy a PC... which will be able to hold at least 4 drives.
  • jbrizz - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    People are going to plug these things into their Mac Pro, then do some 4k video editing on their 5k screen. You are not it's target audience (although you still shouldn't be so ignorant as to think that just because you don't want/need it no one else will).
  • danbob999 - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    That's just one more reason why a Mac Pro is a crap PC. Such a professional PC should include room for at least 4 hard drives. Requiring an external $378 case just to get close to the same performance that you would get with internal drives is a joke.
  • apoctwist - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link

    I had to log into the site for the first time because of how silly this comment is. People working in the pro audio/pro video side are not going to rely on internal storage for their work or software RAID. First of all what happens when the machine you are using dies? What happens with your software RAID array on all those internal drives? With this device due to hardware RAID I can just plug in a cable on a new machine and I'm up and running in minutes. I don't have to worry about taking hard drives out of the PC, I don't have to worry about rebuilding the array (if that's even possible since you are using software RAID tied to you OS). All I have to worry about is a cable.

    That's why devices like these exist. In Pro video workflows external RAID arrays are common and encouraged. You see less heartache in the long run that way.

    As an audio professional I have all of my projects/audio/recording on an external TB raid array. if my machine dies tomorrow I can pick up where I left off the next day. I also have multiple machines for DAW work and I can just plug my TB cable to them and continue working on whatever project I need to with no worries.

    You are looking at a device like this from a consumer level but that's not what it's made for and the price tag is rather in line with what you will find out there for a TB enclosure.
  • theduckofdeath - Saturday, April 16, 2016 - link

    It might sound like harsh words, but, he is right. At the moment,. everything Mac related is stupid solutions to problems we didn't have. Thunderbolt has to die. It's a way to milk consumers for even more money on relatively limited sales.
    There are a ton of ways to make a better solution for your external storage you actually need. The first choice is exactly what he said, design the workstation case to allow for stortage expansion, instead of selling people an overpriced and under-powered garbage bin.
    There's a reason why companies like Oculus and HTC Vice refuse to support Mac OS these days. Because Mac devices are designed to work against the consumer from the foundation, Thunderbolt being one of the key culprits.
  • ganeshts - Saturday, April 16, 2016 - link

    I would have agreed with you a year or so back, but the good thing here is that Thunderbolt has emerged successfully out of the Mac shadow. At present, every Thunderbolt 3 device out there is compatible with Windows only, and not Mac.

    From a system perspective, for a very little premium, board vendors can integrate USB 3.1 Gen 2 + Thunderbolt 3 into their notebooks and consumers can get more out of that integrated port compared to a pure USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C port. Whether that extra premium is worth it, the consumer should figure out. The board we used - GIGABYTE Z170 board with Alpine Ridge integrated - can be purchased for less than $200. I think at this price, compared to a vanilla system, consumers might be OK with something a bit more future-proof.

    From a device perspective, yes, lots of Thunderbolt peripherals are overpriced. But, eGFX solutions will definitely be attractive to a lot of gaming folks who are looking for portability. Then, there is Thunderbolt networking which is attractive for small workgroups (more of a business use-case there). Daisy chaining is another great feature for thin systems.

    Frankly, a year or two back, I wouldn't have been bullish on Thunderbolt, and would have equated it with Firewire. But, with Thunderbolt 3, I think Intel has finally converged on to the right type of solution.
  • theduckofdeath - Saturday, April 16, 2016 - link

    Mobile gaming with an external GPU will stay a niche, as the bottleneck will still be the poorly cooled mobile technology within the notebook. Especially with DX12 and the likes, processor and motherboard component performance will be a lot more relevant than it has been since Microsoft introduced the hardware extraction layer to Windows last decade.
    And it's not just "some" TB accessories that are overpriced for what you get. Like the previous commenter said, you can build an actual PC for the price of this external case. Use it for storage if you like, or whatever else you'd want to use a spare PC for.
  • bobj3832 - Saturday, April 23, 2016 - link

    I've worked in small offices with 6 people and huge corporations with over 100,000 employees. In every company we always had file servers on the network. Virtually no one kept data locally (except travelling sales people) If your workstation goes down just log in somewhere else and continue working.

    For my personal stuff at home I have a 10 gigabit network. The SATA interface (even for the SSDs I have in the file server) is the bottleneck.

    I just don't have any need for Thunderbolt with a 10G network.
  • bobj3832 - Saturday, April 23, 2016 - link

    And before someone complains of the cost I got used SFP+ cards for $20 each and a switch with 4 SFP+ ports for $520. It also has 24 1G ports.
  • JHBoricua - Saturday, April 23, 2016 - link

    Umm, and I had to log to the site to point how your comment on software raid was even more silly.
    What happens if the machine running a software RAID dies, you ask? Simple. Since it is software RAID, you simply mount the RAID volume on another PC running the same Os. That's the beauty of software RAID, it is not tied to the hardware.

    Let me ask you this. What happens when the failed device happens to be this enclosure with its 'hardware' RAID? Well, you better have a spare one of the same make/model lying around or you won't be able to recover the data. But hey, you'll probably be able to use the same cable.

    Seriously, did you even pause to think before commenting on the merits of software RAID vs this device?
  • damianrobertjones - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    I recall, all those years ago, that USB was supposed to feature daisy chaining.
  • HideOut - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    Never. But I think firewire was. USB has always been hub + spoke layout. FW could chain I think.
  • DanNeely - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    You could fake daisy chaining in USB by connecting hubs to each other; and in theory there was no reason you couldn't make a device with a 2port hub that used 1 port internally and exposed the 2nd for daisy chain type usage. Aside from a few higher end keyboards I've never seen anything like this done.

    FW had direct proper support for daisy chaining; but neither of the FW HDD enclosures I owned supported it.
  • hrrmph - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link

    That's how most high-port-quantity USB hubs do it. They internally daisy chain. A "normal" USB hub is typically 4-ports. Use the last of those 4 ports to daisy chain to 4 more ports. The user sees a physical 7 ports on the outside of the hub.
  • Vidmo - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    Waiting on the eight drive version to replace my current USB 3.0 local DAS backup solution. Backing up 36TB of data takes a long time over USB 3.0.
  • danbob999 - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    you are probably limited by your HDD speed, not USB3
  • DanNeely - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    Depends how sequential the io is. Hdds are ~3x faster than usb2, so 4 hdds could bottleneck a 3.0 port.
  • danbob999 - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    They could in some rare case for short periods of time. In the real world, no one will even notice the speed reduction from USB 3.0. Speed will often be much lower, especially on writting, and even more if using RAID1.
  • joos2000 - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link

    It's obviously not a raid 1 array though.
  • theduckofdeath - Saturday, April 16, 2016 - link

    You're not trying to argue someone is using RAID 0 for data backup, are you? :D
  • SpetsnazAntiVIP - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    You would probably be better off building a NAS or SAN server using a hot swap server case or rack, a used $70 Xeon E5 2670, and connecting it to your PC with a 40 Gbps Infiniband link. Used 40 Gbps Infiniband PCIe cards are <$40 on eBay. Infiniband cables can be had for <$15. All of the server parts can be had used on eBay for cheap. You would have much more robust setup, much more configurable storage, better fault tolerance, be able to use more fault tolerant file systems like ZFS or CephFS, and the ability to upgrade and swap faulty parts, rather than replacing the whole storage solution. It would also probably be cheaper than an off the shelf 8 drive solution.
  • SpetsnazAntiVIP - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    Check out this writeup on an E5 2670 dual CPU build for an idea of how fast these processors are for $70 a pop used: http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-affordable-dua...
  • zodiacfml - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link

    Yup. I was not impressed with the product and the technology. Type-C is a convenience thing though and not performance. A decent NAS can keep up with this.
  • sor - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    I really dislike the fact that we've got a single type of port with a dozen varieties of logos on either side, but I suppose it is better than a dozen ports. I wonder what we will do in the following generations as more protocols and protocol versions are added.
  • Meteor2 - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link

    That's the whole point of TB3. It unifies the lot.
  • name99 - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    I don't understand this obsession with daisy-chaining. Daisy-chaining is a LOUSY technology. It's been a lousy technology in every damn form it's ever shipped, whether SCSI, ADB, firewire, or thunderbolt. One of the few things USB actually got right from the start was to make it clear on day one that their expansion solution was hubs, not daisy-chaining.

    Why does it suck?
    - It substantially reduces your power-on-off flexibility. This may not matter in a testing lab, but in the real world there are constant reasons why you might want to power a device off. With a hub this is a simple issue; with a daisy-chain it requires considering the implications of everything that is connected, and generally unmounting a bunch of devices then changing the topology.

    - right now when it's all skittles and roses, every thunderbolt device comes with two ports. But as soon as this goes mainstream, the usual attempts at cost-cutting will have one device after another shipping with only one port. And then what happens to your chaining?

    Because USB got this right on day one, USB hubs have always been cheap as dirt. Everybody owns one, and devices that need to present the illusion of daisy-chaining (like keyboards with two USB ports, one for the mouse to connect to; or displays with USB connectors) just stick in a cheap USB hub chip. Because Firewire (and the other specs I mentioned) did NOT get this right, FW hubs never became cheap. Even the FW400 hubs were expensive, and I don't think decent FW800 hubs were EVER produced (when I was looking for them, the best I could find was a pathetic two port hub).

    Instead of cheering how great Thunderbolt daisy-chaining is, you should be considering the reality that, because Intel has insisted on doing things this way (in spite of THIRTY YEARS of evidence that it is a stupid idea) they are likely going to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. All those thunderbolt-enabled USB C ports will ACTUALLY land up connected to pure USB3.1 hubs, which will in turn, once again, mean that USB3.1 is the only really viable mass market for storage, and these super-high-end storage solutions (and external GPUs, etc) will continue to remain irrelevant to the mass market.
    Nice going Intel --- turns out instruction sets are not the only things you're incapable of handling competently.
  • Klug4Pres - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link

    Enjoyable rant, thanks!
  • Wardrop - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link

    I'm sure Apple, who are obsessed with having a single cable for everything, would have been the ones who pushed Intel to support daisy chaining.

    Daisy chaining isn't a bad idea if implemented properly though. It should be passive to really work, as in, a physically unplugged device should be able to pass through a thunderbolt signal. Like a switch that opens and closes depending on whether the device is powered on or not.
  • galta - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link

    A little bit angrier than I would have expected, but correct in its essence.
    All these weird proprietary interfaces fail for a combination of high costs and lack of scale. All of us - or at least most of us - remember when microchannel was thought to be the future and we all know were it ended.
    As someone said before, Thunderbolt, as well as FireWire in its time, will make sense only for the 15 people who make 4k video editing on a 5k monitor on their Apples.
    The remaining will be more than glad to remain with USB.
  • zodiacfml - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link

    Same here. I never understood daisy chaining. I just dismissed it long ago that some people use the feature.
  • ganeshts - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link

    Daisy chaining is a feature that is available.

    It is not mandatory that it needs to be used.

    Most people can just use a dock and it would have all the types of USB 3.x ports that they need.

    The beauty of Thunderbolt 3 is that it allows for just a single interface in sleek products, and it will have an ecosystem that allows people to pick and choose what interfaces they want in their system when 'docked' - that can't be said for proprietary interfaces developed by system vendors. (though I do agree that Thunderbolt being restricted to Intel-only systems is a bit of an issue in the long run - if AMD manages to claw back to performance parity with mid-range and higher Intel systems)
  • hyno111 - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link

    The ATTO and CrystalDiskMark result for SSD RAID is missing.
  • ganeshts - Friday, April 15, 2016 - link

    My apologies. There was a CMS issue when we updated the HDD results. It is now fixed.
  • epobirs - Saturday, April 16, 2016 - link

    Considering the main bottleneck here is going to be SATA, it seems like the box could have been implemented with USB 3.1 Gen 2 and delivered the same performance at lower cost. Even with two SSDs rather than platter drives, the best throughput after overhead should rarely exceed what USB 3.1 can handle.

    Down the road, a box with slots for, say, four U.2 SSDs, should really utilize Thunderbolt 3's bandwidth while still being small enough to consider portable. THAT would be worth spending a good amount for a professional user, being able to access live data or do very large backups at those speeds in a rig small enough to go on a location shoot comfortably.
  • ganeshts - Saturday, April 16, 2016 - link

    Definitely.. the performance of a single unit is very close to that of the bus-powered SanDisk Extreme 900 we reviewed before. However, this unit is clearly meant to introduce the benefits of Thunderbolt 3 to the market - DisplayPort output, daisy chaining with docks for extra functionality etc. The storage bandwidth from a single unit is not the main focus, as this is one of the first Thunderbolt 3 devices to be introduced. We will soon see high bay-count devices with Thunderbolt 3 at NAB next week - Accusys has already pre-announced a 12-bay one.
  • bill44 - Saturday, April 16, 2016 - link

    Agreed. If performance is what you seek, this maybe it;
    https://www.cinema5d.com/faster-than-fast-sonnet-f...
  • philipma1957 - Saturday, April 16, 2016 - link

    I am more of a Mac guy then a Windows or a linux guy.
    I own 3 macs
    I own 3 windows pcs
    I own a linux pc

    Thunderbolt is all over my home and I use it for a lot of IT work on Macs.
    A portable 2 drive piece of gear like this allows for rescue work.
    Simply have a ssd in one slot with a mac os and a blank ssd 2tb samsung. go to a clients place
    boot with it and then clone and rescue the dead mac's hhd on the big ssd in your other slot.

    I do this now with an older version of thunderbolt then this one. Works great.
    I have owned a dozen thunderbolt devices and they are day and nigh over most usb3 devices in terms of being a reliable stable external booter. None of this matters to most none mac users.

    One of the great features is I can plug in a thunderbolt mac os and boot most macs.

    Windows never really allowed this. So to complain about a system like thunderbolt costing too much is okay but the truth is when you realize what thunderbolt 1 and thunderbolt 2 can do to and with someone else's mac you would say that it is too cheap .
  • LuxZg - Sunday, April 17, 2016 - link

    Is it just me or did you really comparr a performance of USB 3.1 Gen.2 SSD connected directly to PC's GEN2 port, vs it connecting to GEN1 port of a DAS and claimed that performance drop is purely due to DAISY CHAINING?
  • ganeshts - Sunday, April 17, 2016 - link

    Nope.

    The USB 3.1 Gen 2 SSD is first connected to a PC's Gen 2 port.

    In the second case, it is connected to the Thunderbolt 3 port of the second DAS unit. Note that Thunderbolt 3 can support both Thunderbolt peripherals as well as USB 3.1 Gen 2 devices for daisy chaining. Only obvious restriction is that USB 3.1 Gen 2 devices can appear only at the end of the daisy chain.

    Also, please read specifications carefully for the USB 3.1 Gen 1 port of the DAS - The Gen 1 port is a device port - i.e, it can connect to a PC directly. It can't connect to another device like the Extreme 900 Portable SSD.
  • Zizy - Monday, April 18, 2016 - link

    1.) Could you please add USB 3.1 results for direct-attached? (just use USB cable instead of thunderbolt). Presumably the same, right? So, what is the point of Thunderbolt here? Daisy chaining?
    2.) Temperature is steadily increasing in your test. 10 minutes is quite short-ish test. What is the steady-state temperature and does it throttle at that temperature?
  • ganeshts - Monday, April 18, 2016 - link

    (1) The USB 3.1 port is USB 3.1 Gen 1 - Maximum possible bandwidth on that is theoretically 5 Gbps, but, in practice, for RAID-0 SSDs, one would get around 450 - 500 MBps. So, it will not be the same as that of Thunderbolt 3 - where we could get around 800 MBps

    (2) Temperature for SSD configuration was with the fans completely turned off. You can see that the fan 'on' case for HDDs shows that even after more than 250GB of continuous data transfer, the temperature of the HDDs is within 5C of the temperature prior to the start of the transfers. I don't expect throttling to be a concern. If it is (depending on the SSD or HDD in use), one should just turn on the fan.
  • Haravikk - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link

    Pretty underwhelming for the enormous price; USB3 is fast enough to handle three or even four drives if there's hardware RAID on the other end, so Thunderbolt only really offers an improvement if you're handling a JBOD enclosure, and even then two drives won't really justify it.

    Also, for the price, why aren't these hot-swap bays? Someone wanting to use paired drives in a mirror setup would benefit from being able to hot-swap in a replacement, and for the money you're spending I'd think that pretty reasonable.

    Lastly, couldn't this be bus-powered? Even 3.5" drives shouldn't require so much power the bus can't handle it, plus any good RAID controller should be able to spin them up separately (so you're not drawing peak power for both drives simultaneously).

    I dunno, I get that Thunderbolt is still a premium product, but it still feels as though the actual quality of design and features you're getting is severely lacking. Besides, being the first Thunderbolt 3 enclosure for two SATA III drives is meaningless as even Thunderbolt 1 is more than fast enough for that. Even the bigger "high end" enclosures are surprisingly poorly made and thought out for the amount of money you need to drop on them; a networked iSCSI device using ZFS with l2ARC will meet most needs, and the NAS/SAS options are just way better.
  • Questor - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link

    I believe computing and related has come to a point where it needs an official organization to manage and assign acronyms.
  • Chad - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link

    As a thunderbolt user, there are several other benefits (especially for Mac's) that is brings to the table. For example, I added an external HDD, then added 5 more, 1 by 1 as time went on and as needed, for a total of 6, but only using the 1 port. On Mac's, ports are a valuable commodity. On this same iMac, I only had a few USB ports and they were quickly used up for various things. So that left the thunderbolt port... but i was able to connect 5 devices on it. None of them came even remotely close to using it's bandwidth, but for me, it wasn't about that, or about speed... but expandability. That is something worth noting, for sure. Granted, in PC land, this isn't really a concern, but on Mac's, it's a huge thing. There's also an aesthetic factor to daisey chaining, over a spiderweb hub solution.
  • Haravikk - Wednesday, April 20, 2016 - link

    True, but my main point was that you're paying a pretty big premium for the Thunderbolt aspect of this device, for what is overall a pretty poor product; two 3.5" bays, not really setup well for 2.5" drives, not hot-swappable, not actually all that compact. Even little things haven't been thought through, like the place of the Thunderbolt ports under the fan, limiting you to a smaller fan size (bigger is always better when it comes to noise after all).

    Also, technically it's possible to create daisy-chained USB devices too (each one would integrate a three port hub, with one port for whatever it actually does), the only difference with Thunderbolt really is that it's a crucial part of the design so manufacturers are forced to enable chaining, whereas USB device manufacturers are happier cutting their costs and forcing us to rely on hubs.

    Also, if I've understood you right and you've got six HDDs, I'd seriously consider an 8-bay NAS instead. If you're fine with command line stuff then you can set that up with ZFS backed iSCSI, format the iSCSI volume as ZFS on your mac and assign it a chunk of your internal drive as a cache, and it's just better overall (if a little complex to setup in the first place). If someone manufactured a Thunderbolt cache device that I could plug straight between a Mac and a NAS then that would be the perfect option, but until then it's big local cache plus NAS with tons of drives for me =)

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