4 bay thunderbolt enclosure...

[ivnj]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5956/qnaps-jtb400-a-byod-4bay-thunderbolt-enclosure

Its good to see more options coming out. I hope its reasonably priced when it comes out.

 

[EmpyreanUK]

Me too. I'm getting tired of running my media collection HD and Time Machine HD over a single USB 2.0 port, which is the solution I've been 'temporarily' making-do with for a year now!

 

[Macman45]

This will make things a lot more affordable for people requiring fast mass storage...I knew it was coming but just couldn't wait, and therefore purchased a Pegasus R4...I have been considering an R8 shortly, but if the qnap enclosures are daisy chain compatible, and if they make an 8 bay model, adding my own drives would be a breeze, and more importantly, a damn site cheaper than the Promise range.

The Pegasus stuff is great, gives true high speed DTR's, but cheap it isn't.

 

[ThePreditor]

I've been using a DroboS over FW800 with 5x4TB drives for a few months with no issues. Drobo is coming out with a 5-bay Thunderbolt enclosure sometime soon. Drobo isn't the fastest in the world, but I have my media library on it and it feeds my quad core Mac Mini Blu Ray rips just fine.

 

[Joseph Farrugia]

Looks like it has TB pass-through…?

this image from that article seems to indicate there will be a TB pass-through, allowing daisy-chaining other devices, eg an ACD display or a TB display:

The top cable seems to be like a TB cable chopped off, put in there just for demo purposes.

regards,
JF

 

[Macman45]

this image from that article seems to indicate there will be a TB pass-through, allowing daisy-chaining other devices, eg an ACD display or a TB display:

Image

The top cable seems to be like a TB cable chopped off, put in there just for demo purposes.

regards,
JF

Yep, T/Bolt daisy chain and VGA port clearly visible....Just add drives. As much as I like Promise, this could work out substantially cheaper...As long as that enclosure is fully compatible with my R4 and there is no reason why it won''t be..$$$ can be saved here.

 

[antman2x2]

FINALLY. I really hope this will be around 199$ without drives.

 

[jamesr19]

Yep, T/Bolt daisy chain and VGA port clearly visible....Just add drives.

Yeh..that's not a VGA port. It's most likely a Serial port, although I'm not sure what a serial port would be needed for on a device like this

 

[murphychris]

Yeh..that's not a VGA port. It's most likely a Serial port, although I'm not sure what a serial port would be needed for on a device like this

It may not go anywhere, as I'd think this is RAID in a chipset, rather than linux mdraid running on an atom chip. But if it's OS based, which isn't uncommon actually, the way to manage it is via serial console which is what this port would be for.

 

[Macman45]

It may not go anywhere, as I'd think this is RAID in a chipset, rather than linux mdraid running on an atom chip. But if it's OS based, which isn't uncommon actually, the way to manage it is via serial console which is what this port would be for.

Hmm, doing some more digging...The Pegasus does have a display pass through, and if that chipset is RAID, then I'm back to looking at an R8 or maybe a 12. Shame, I hoped they would be 100% compatible, just daisy chain my Promise unit and bingo.

Couldn't be that easy though now could it?

 

[theSeb]

It may not go anywhere, as I'd think this is RAID in a chipset, rather than linux mdraid running on an atom chip. But if it's OS based, which isn't uncommon actually, the way to manage it is via serial console which is what this port would be for.

Most of the QNAP (I've checked if all of them do, I suspect the lower ranges ones don't) have a VGA port. According the specifications it's a "Reserved VGA interface for maintenance". Synology had these as well, but they are phasing them out, even on the DS18xx model. This makes sense for a NAS, but not on a DAS so I suspect you're right. I think they've just used one of their existing boxes to show off the TB DAS prototype and it will either be removed in the final version, or blanked off like on my Synology DS1511+ (according to the manual it's for manufacturing use only)

----------

Hmm, doing some more digging...The Pegasus does have a display pass through, and if that chipset is RAID, then I'm back to looking at an R8 or maybe a 12. Shame, I hoped they would be 100% compatible, just daisy chain my Promise unit and bingo.

Couldn't be that easy though now could it?

I am not following. The VGA port and it's lack of functionality has nothing to do with TB pass-through. Since the QNAP DAS has two TB ports, it's designed to be daisy-chained and I expect it to be able to pass-through the display port signal, unless they are using the same chipset that the ATD uses (hopefully not), which requires another TB device inserted into the chain after the ATD to get a display port signal. It would be silly to release a TB product like a storage array without the ability to daisy chain, but obviously we can only speculate with the lack of official details.