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Should I wait for a TB external enclosure or...

W

WesCole

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 1, 2010
756
14
Texas
I am trying to hold out hope that there will be a semi-reasonably priced thunderbolt external enclosure in the near future that I can put a few HDDs into. I will mainly use it for Time Machine, storing my iTunes library, and some photos, videos etc.

However, given that I don't really need all that bandwidth, can anyone recommend a good (at least) 3-Bay enclosure that uses Firewire 800? I have looked around, but haven't really found anything that I have liked. I would really like to not spend more than $150-$200 for the enclosure, too. Also, I already have some bare drives to put in the enclosure, so that is not an issue.

Thanks for any help.

Edited to add: I currently have a Thermaltake BlackX Duet, which is finicky with my new iMac.
 
Not available yet .. You can look into Promise Pegasus R4 for 4 x 1TB Thunderbolt RAID HDD. That's definitely something you're looking for, but has been a different class and market. It's a lil less than $1000 as today.

You may want to wait for Thunderbolt enclosures to be sold freely, and you can plug in your own SSD/HDD onto it. We don't know about the price yet, but yeah .. as of today, you have to wait :)

Alternatively for your Mac, you can use FW800 enclosures/drives for much more reasonable price. And the speed is not that bad either, 60-80MB/s transfer rate can be easily reached, twice better than USB2.0 for sure
 
Any idea on where I get get a good multi-bay FW800 enclosure? I checked newegg, but couldn't really find anything like I am looking for.
 
I am very close to internally adding a vertex 3 ssd to my new i7, but i have decided to wait for TB external drives from Lacie. I hope it will be out shortly cause Pegasus already out.
 
WesCole said:
Any idea on where I get get a good multi-bay FW800 enclosure? I checked newegg, but couldn't really find anything like I am looking for.
Click to expand...

You can start here :D .. fit your budget too, hope that helps
 
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Thanks for the suggestions. :)

I guess I just didn't look hard enough. Haha. Those are some really good units at reasonable prices. I might pick one of them up after I look at them a little more closely.

Thanks again!
 
I'm quite in the same position as the thread starter. I'm definitely going to buy an highend i7 27" iMac. But I didn't want to open this pretty machine, so I'm going to add some hdd and the bootdrive ssd via thunderbolt.

What do you think are the chances that apple removes the bootability over the thunderbolt via a later firmware update, to force customers to buy there own intern ssds... ?
 
nochnia said:
I'm quite in the same position as the thread starter. I'm definitely going to buy an highend i7 27" iMac. But I didn't want to open this pretty machine, so I'm going to add some hdd and the bootdrive ssd via thunderbolt.

What do you think are the chances that apple removes the bootability over the thunderbolt via a later firmware update, to force customers to buy there own intern ssds... ?
Click to expand...

Zero chance Apple would remove external boot ability. Lots of developers rely on the ability to boot from external media.

I personally opted to use a USB 3.0 expresscard/34 adaptor for the moment, since external USB 3.0 devices seem generally kind of cheap, there's a two-slot external SATA dock I like, and also most USB 3.0 devices seem to work OK with 3TB drives (I know from personal experience at least some FW800 docks do not support anything above 2TB). When a crop of external Thunderbolt docks arrive I'll just get rid of the USB 3.0 stuff.
 
nochnia said:
I'm quite in the same position as the thread starter. I'm definitely going to buy an highend i7 27" iMac. But I didn't want to open this pretty machine, so I'm going to add some hdd and the bootdrive ssd via thunderbolt.

What do you think are the chances that apple removes the bootability over the thunderbolt via a later firmware update, to force customers to buy there own intern ssds... ?
Click to expand...

zero chance. think of this from apples viewpoint . they sell you an imac for the office and imac for the home. the internal drive is a 2tb used as a backup booter for the external lacie little big disk. what do you get from this. an external stable boot drive running at 600MB/s with a permanent internal backup drive. iMac can do 32gb of ram. this allows apple to cut back on the low level mac pro and boost the sales of the high level imac.

this ram works for 2011 iMacs

http://www.ebay.com/itm/8GB-DDR3-13...Notebook-Memory-204-pin-SODIMM-/220850191733?

iMac sales will go much much much higher once a booting t-bolt is shown to work.


right now you can buy two of these for about 200


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148447


pop them into this


http://store.apple.com/us/product/H...s-hard-drive?fnode=MTY1NDA0Nw&mco=MjU1MjAyNDA


and have a huge speed boost for your 2011 iMac
 
This is only a 2 bay unit, which could be problem if you are using older, smaller drives, but I love it with 2x 1TB Caviar Blacks in it. It is not the quietest enclosure, I keep it in a cabinet, but it keeps the Blacks very cool. It's usable in RAID or independent mode, which I have been using, and hasn't given me any trouble at all. In RAID it wants matched drives, but in independent I've tried it with every combo of WD drives I have and it works fine. You would have to contact them if you have different brands of drives though.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817507011
 
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