Why are thunderbolt hard drive enclosures crazy money ?

Combat squirrel

Combat squirrel

Combat squirrel

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As title, they seem to be hundreds of ££'s :( - I don't get it, sure I want a 4 bay or more but they are SO much more than equivalent USB 3 etc etc...I have one thunderbolt 2 port on my laptop and want to run 4 drives and a monitor off it , im looking at £330-500 for various models :(

Is there any cheaper ones and if not, why not ?
 
£300 for 4 drives though? That doesn't seem too much as it's along the price of a low end Synology NAS.

It's not just a sata - usb adapter like a single drive caddy would be - it'll have raid tech in there.

Compared to something like the HP Gen 8 microserver though, it does seem quite pricey
 
crinkleshoes said:
£300 for 4 drives though? That doesn't seem too much as it's along the price of a low end Synology NAS.

It's not just a sata - usb adapter like a single drive caddy would be - it'll have raid tech in there.

Compared to something like the HP Gen 8 microserver though, it does seem quite pricey
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Yeah not even RAID some of them - £300 for a 5 bay non raid (just shows as 5 normal drives - which I want)

You just gave me an idea though !!

COULD I BUILD A 'THUNDERBOLT HARD DRIVE ARRAY' - From a normal pc ? I Have a spare quad xeon around - and a pcie thunderbolt card? would that work ?! and also be able to pass the display port/TB 2 plug through ok ?
 
With thunderbolt 2 or 3 (which I think have bandwidths of 20Gb and 40Gb respectively).
Won't a DAS be massively bottle necked by firstly the drive interface (sata 6Gb or SAS 12Gb) and then by the bandwidth of the drives themselves, which for spinning rust are typically far lower than the interfaces?

As an edge case, maybe a 32GB PCIe NVME SSD could use some of the bandwidth, maybe they exist but it wouldn't surprise me if anything that actually needs/utilises a 20Gb external link isn't cheap.

More obvious alternatives to my mind are standard USB 3.1 (10Gb arguably enough for any drive you are likely to use) or an external SAS box 12Gb (which we use at work) but arguably our spinning rust is never going to saturate that.

Personally I suspect these boxes are expensive because the only people buying are basing it on headline figures and not actual likely performance of their set up, if I'm wrong I'd be interested to see whats possible...

Unlike external GPUs I'd suggest Thunderbolt 2/3 DAS are a solution to problems that don't currently exist for the most part.
 
stewski said:
With thunderbolt 2 or 3 (which I think have bandwidths of 20Gb and 40Gb respectively).
Won't a DAS be massively bottle necked by firstly the drive interface (sata 6Gb or SAS 12Gb) and then by the bandwidth of the drives themselves, which for spinning rust are typically far lower than the interfaces?

As an edge case, maybe a 32GB PCIe NVME SSD could use some of the bandwidth, maybe they exist but it wouldn't surprise me if anything that actually needs/utilises a 20Gb external link isn't cheap.

More obvious alternatives to my mind are standard USB 3.1 (10Gb arguably enough for any drive you are likely to use) or an external SAS box 12Gb (which we use at work) but arguably our spinning rust is never going to saturate that.

Personally I suspect these boxes are expensive because the only people buying are basing it on headline figures and not actual likely performance of their set up, if I'm wrong I'd be interested to see whats possible...

Unlike external GPUs I'd suggest Thunderbolt 2/3 DAS are a solution to problems that don't currently exist for the most part.
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Well yeah basically I want plenty of bandwidth to play with to be honest - I'd use it as a bay for say upto 5 x 6TB Toshiba drives - they seem to sustain 180mb a sec on my internal PC currently - i want them to do that, also id like to daisy chain my monitor through it so less cables to connect - its an asus rog laptop with thunderbolt 2 port.

Also if I DID put a SSD in the thunderbolt port - it would be nice to have it run near full speed.

I have a USB 3 hub now and it seems to top out at 130mb sec off one drive...so not enough for 5

So yeah if i can have one box that can handle 5 drives sustained read/write and a monitor also (what would ITS max res be ?) - ideal
 
Combat squirrel said:
Well yeah basically I want plenty of bandwidth to play with to be honest - I'd use it as a bay for say upto 5 x 6TB Toshiba drives - they seem to sustain 180mb a sec on my internal PC currently - i want them to do that, also id like to daisy chain my monitor through it so less cables to connect - its an asus rog laptop with thunderbolt 2 port.

Also if I DID put a SSD in the thunderbolt port - it would be nice to have it run near full speed.

I have a USB 3 hub now and it seems to top out at 130mb sec off one drive...so not enough for 5

So yeah if i can have one box that can handle 5 drives sustained read/write and a monitor also (what would ITS max res be ?) - ideal
Click to expand...

I can understand the push for ultra fast NAS or DAS. That said I wouldn't suggest the kit will/should be cheap, or that the setup will be simple for bench marking/specifying the ACTUAL likely requirement of the link.
 
Combat squirrel said:
Yeah not even RAID some of them - £300 for a 5 bay non raid (just shows as 5 normal drives - which I want)

You just gave me an idea though !!

COULD I BUILD A 'THUNDERBOLT HARD DRIVE ARRAY' - From a normal pc ? I Have a spare quad xeon around - and a pcie thunderbolt card? would that work ?! and also be able to pass the display port/TB 2 plug through ok ?
Click to expand...

If you're doing that - why not just make it a 10gbit nas?

10gbe cards / fibre cards can be had dirt cheap on ebay.

Then it's on your network and you can still use TB for display.

edit: reading other posts i assume that would be too slow... note if setting the drives up as JBOD you have to rely on the controller in the hard drive caddy, the port and the pc to handle max bandwidth to go from one drive to the next... it won't go between itself in the caddy - it'll go through the pc. (ie, from the sounds of what you're describing - it's unlikely you would reap the benefits of thunderbolt drives anyway and would probably benefit from getting a pair of second hand 2x10gbe / 2xfibre / 4x etc which would be better at handling the throughput to/from a server-like device).

You would be heavily dependent upon the controller in the TB HDD box... something I will admit I'm not hugely familiar with.

Alternately... I would be tempted to get an external single drive tb enclosure with a large/decent SSD for the main things and offloading the rest to a NAS... sorry if you've already considered and discounted that... just think there might be ways to get what you want for less money and/or a "better" configuration.

With a single port 10gbe nas... you should still be able to manage 500MB/s between drives on the NAS though your computer (if possible with the drives)... have raid options... and be able to move files around "within" the NAS... which takes your laptop out of the equation for the transfers. Potential other benefits available there without increasing the price. So with JBOD/single drive configuration... I doubt you would lose any speed. The only lag/delay you might have is if you were planning on running a bunch of VMs off it - which would be better with a single SSD TB enclosure or potential replacing any internal spinning platter drive with a large ssd.

Proper networking would be better than a thunderbolt-based NAS with pass-through... which is kinda what's being described.
 
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You want single drive speeds as you don't want RAID and are worried about sustaining 180MB/s? Any of the new connectivity technologies will sustain that with ease. I have an SSD in a USB3.0 caddy (the chipset in the caddy/hub is important so yours may be the bottleneck here) and I get 400MB/s read/writes from it.

I am currently waiting for this to be released to build a DrivePool array with.
 
ubern00b said:
You want single drive speeds as you don't want RAID and are worried about sustaining 180MB/s? Any of the new connectivity technologies will sustain that with ease. I have an SSD in a USB3.0 caddy (the chipset in the caddy/hub is important so yours may be the bottleneck here) and I get 400MB/s read/writes from it.

I am currently waiting for this to be released to build a DrivePool array with.
Click to expand...

Ahhh ok awesome so USB 3.0 should really be enough for me ? I thought it maxed out somewhere around 130mb a sec for some daft reason, that thing you linked with 10 drive bays , OMG :eek:
 
Also -- is it possible to build my own USB 3 external hard drive solution ?????

I have plenty of drives, cases, spare lower power CPU/Ram mainboard etc and some boards have there own USB 3 ports - does some sort of linux software exist to make my main rig 'see' it as it would for example that 10 drive box ?
 
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