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Monoprice Thunderbolt Storage Enclosures

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paulrbeers

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Dec 17, 2009
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New Monoprice Thunderbolt Storage Enclosures
Monoprice just announced new Thunderbolt Storage Enclosures:

http://www.monoprice.com/Category?c_...&cs_id=1130705


They look suspiciously like Akitios.....

http://www.akitio.com/thunderbolt-series

Monoprice is priced cheaper, but Akitio throws in TB Cable.

EDIT: Appears Monoprice includes a TB cable as well. ThunderDuo would be a great device for throwing two SSD's and RAID 0 for some super high speed editing storage.
 
paulrbeers said:
New Monoprice Thunderbolt Storage Enclosures
Monoprice just announced new Thunderbolt Storage Enclosures:

http://www.monoprice.com/Category?c_...&cs_id=1130705


They look suspiciously like Akitios.....

http://www.akitio.com/thunderbolt-series

Monoprice is priced cheaper, but Akitio throws in TB Cable.

EDIT: Appears Monoprice includes a TB cable as well. ThunderDuo would be a great device for throwing two SSD's and RAID 0 for some super high speed editing storage.
Click to expand...

Not suspiciously like but the same ... the images on the monoprice site show the Akitio name on device
 
AppleDApp said:
Still very few 3.5" enclosure options.
Click to expand...

OWC elite dual is TB/USB3 and accommodates 2 3.5" drives.

i have one sitting next to me. about to open it in the next hour or so.

the OWC model is $299 vs ~230 or so for the monoprice/akitio.

i believe the OWC requires power. wonder if the monoprice/akitio can drive two 1TB ssds.
 
AppleDApp said:
Still very few 3.5" enclosure options.
Click to expand...

Seeing as how 3.5" drives would mean mechanical and thus has built in latency, there really isn't much of an advantage of putting 3.5" drives on Thunderbolt compared to USB 3.0. The main advantage of Thunderbolt is 4x the bandwidth and low latency. Unless you RAID 0 4 hard drives, you aren't going to surpass USB 3.0 and the additional latency created by using USB 3.0 isn't really a big deal because the hard drives themselves are already introducing latency since they have considerably seek time..

Now RAID 0 even two SSD's and you already have surpassed USB 3.0's bandwidth (considerably) and since there is virtually no latency/seek time for a SSD then additional benefit of virtually no latency from TB makes it the perfect connection for SSD's.

I would love to get one of the ThunderDuo's and shove 2 1TB Samsung EVO's or Crucial M500's in RAID 0 as a super high speed 2TB disk. However, I really have no idea what I would do with a drive that as 1GB/s transfer rates other than put my OS on it I guess?

(note: I have no idea what I would do, others have very very valid needs for a drive with that kind of transfer rate).
 
Could you even get up to 1gb/s with TB1?

I was always avoiding raid 0 setup but with ssds it seems a lot more interesting than with traditional hard drives. How different would you consider the risk of the raid failing with ssds compared to hdds?
 
paulrbeers said:
Seeing as how 3.5" drives would mean mechanical and thus has built in latency, there really isn't much of an advantage of putting 3.5" drives on Thunderbolt compared to USB 3.0. The main advantage of Thunderbolt is 4x the bandwidth and low latency. Unless you RAID 0 4 hard drives, you aren't going to surpass USB 3.0 and the additional latency created by using USB 3.0 isn't really a big deal because the hard drives themselves are already introducing latency since they have considerably seek time..

Now RAID 0 even two SSD's and you already have surpassed USB 3.0's bandwidth (considerably) and since there is virtually no latency/seek time for a SSD then additional benefit of virtually no latency from TB makes it the perfect connection for SSD's.

I would love to get one of the ThunderDuo's and shove 2 1TB Samsung EVO's or Crucial M500's in RAID 0 as a super high speed 2TB disk. However, I really have no idea what I would do with a drive that as 1GB/s transfer rates other than put my OS on it I guess?

(note: I have no idea what I would do, others have very very valid needs for a drive with that kind of transfer rate).
Click to expand...

true but thunderbolt offers daisy chaining and a more consistant transfer speed.
 
analog guy said:
OWC elite dual is TB/USB3 and accommodates 2 3.5" drives.

i have one sitting next to me. about to open it in the next hour or so.

the OWC model is $299 vs ~230 or so for the monoprice/akitio.

i believe the OWC requires power. wonder if the monoprice/akitio can drive two 1TB ssds.
Click to expand...

I cant see it on the OWC site. link?
 
chfilm said:
Could you even get up to 1gb/s with TB1?

I was always avoiding raid 0 setup but with ssds it seems a lot more interesting than with traditional hard drives. How different would you consider the risk of the raid failing with ssds compared to hdds?
Click to expand...

The Anandtech review of the Pegasus r6 gets pretty close with 6 SSDs.
 
theSeb said:
The Anandtech review of the Pegasus r6 gets pretty close with 6 SSDs.
Click to expand...

i got 800+ MB/s with 2 Samsung 840 EVO 1TB drives in a Sonnet Echo Express III-D (TB1 at the moment).

My R4 diskless just arrived, so I'll pop those in tonight and see what I get.

I'm surprised it took 6 drives to get nearly 1GB/s.
 
AppleDApp said:
true but thunderbolt offers daisy chaining and a more consistant transfer speed.
Click to expand...
That's not always true:

macperformanceguide.com said:
From:
http://macperformanceguide.com/Reviews-OWC-EliteProDual-TB-USB3-Thunderbolt-vs-USB3.html

“...It turns out that USB is not only just as fast, but offers a slightly tighter performance envelope; the write speed variation with Thunderbolt is more (red line)...”
Click to expand...

Many USB 3.0 implementations, such as USB 3.0 controllers from ASMedia support UASP, which is a SCSI implementation and much faster than USB 3.0 BOT. The speed of USB 3.0 +UASP is similar to the speed of eSATA.
 
Mr. Retrofire said:
Some 2011 Macs have Thunderbolt 1.0, but no USB 3.0.
Click to expand...

Seeing as you can get the Caldigit dock with USB 3.0 and a 4 bay USB enclosure for $300 total, even the 2011s can have a 4 bay enclosure for less than a thunderbolt 4 bay enclosure.
 
Mr. Retrofire said:
Many USB 3.0 implementations, such as USB 3.0 controllers from ASMedia support which is a SCSI implementation and much faster than USB 3.0 BOT. The speed of USB 3.0 +UASP is similar to the speed of eSATA.
Click to expand...

I thought USB 3.0 +UASP costs about as much as TB and has significant latency issues.

Drive tests are data and data can be tweaked or filtered to show just about anything. :) I have a test suit that brings USB 3.0 +USAP to its knees where eSATA just chugs along...
 
ColdCase said:
I thought USB 3.0 +UASP costs about as much as TB and has significant latency issues.
Click to expand...

You can find them pretty cheap. Here is a USB3 enclosure with the ASMedia 1053e chipset (full SATA III) and UASP for $25. I have not seen any TB enclosures anywhere close to this price.
 
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