A single Thunderbolt enclosure with multiple 3.5" drives connected to an iMac... does it mount each drive separately or must they each be in their own enclosure and daisy-chained? Or...?
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Thunderbolt enclosure question
- Thread starter kirkbross
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With most multi-disk enclosures it can go either way. You usually get some options for different kinds of RAID or that the dives show up individually.
You don't specify which product you are talking about, but in general normally there are switches inside you can set.
The way to find out is to download and read the user manual BEFORE you buy.
Thanks! I haven't chosen a model yet... they seem to be pretty expensive and most are just dual drive enclosures. I haven't found a 4 drive solution yet, but I'm still hunting.
If they have "JBOD" mode, then you can access the drives individually, although you can RAID-0, 1, or 10 yourself within OS X using Disk Utility. Otherwise, they will probably have a hardware RAID in the enclosure and will appear as a single drive to OS X. The enclosure will have multiple eSATA connectors for the drives, and present a single pass-though (usually) Thunderbolt interface to the computer.
If you want the flexibility of a Thunderbolt JBOD enclosure, I like the OWC "Thunderbay IV" (or the new TB2 "Thunderbay 4"). Both are available as bare enclosures, or already configured with drives (and SoftRAID-5 if desired). Fast and quiet!
Do a search on Amazon and you will find all price ranges of enclosures to do what you want. Most will have eSATA, USB 3.0, and FireWire interface choices. Some will be Thunderbolt. Read the reviews, some will be quite noisy and may be objectionable to you.
If you want the flexibility of a Thunderbolt JBOD enclosure, I like the OWC "Thunderbay IV" (or the new TB2 "Thunderbay 4"). Both are available as bare enclosures, or already configured with drives (and SoftRAID-5 if desired). Fast and quiet!
Do a search on Amazon and you will find all price ranges of enclosures to do what you want. Most will have eSATA, USB 3.0, and FireWire interface choices. Some will be Thunderbolt. Read the reviews, some will be quite noisy and may be objectionable to you.
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