Drive Docks, 3TB and Thunderbolt
I recently picked up a Drobo 5D (drobo.com, amazon affiliate), and loaded it up with 3x3TB drives, and while I was at it, I picked up a 3TB drive to be my new Time Machine disk. It's early days still, but I like it so far.
I like to have access to a lot of external storage, much of which can be offline when I'm not accessing it. The simplest way to do that rather than pile up lots of external hard drives is to have a drive dock. When I first picked up a drive dock, I was already starting to realize that I'd want eSATA or something more advanced than I was going to get from USB 2.0, and ideally more than FW800.
While I waiting for somthing truly spectacular to emerge, I found a Thermaltake BlacX:
It's fine. It's not a model of beauty or incredibly polished, but it has gotten the job done. I've had a few issues with it over the years, but nothing that was truly a show-stopper. Unfortunately, it doesn't deal well with 3TB drives. The 3TB drive shows up in Disk Utility as 801.57GB, and I'm not the only one who's encountered this.
In the intervening years, I've been waiting patiently for a better solution, and in recent years, what I'd really like to see is a very-well-reviewed Thunderbolt drive dock, or possibly a Thunderbolt dock that also handles drive-dock responsiblities. For instance, an updated version of the Voyager Q (newertech.com, amazon affiliate) that supports Thunderbolt would be nice. It's been a long wait, and there's nothing really impressive on the market yet.
In the short term, I will probably just put the 3TB drive in the Drobo with its four siblings, and get a 2TB or 1TB drive for time machine. In the longer term, I'll be watching for a Thunderbolt dock.I've never heard of Sunix, but this Sunix thunderbolt dock could theoretically be an option, but like most Thunderbolt products, it seems like the gap between announcement and delivery is huge.
Incidentally, I'm curious to discover if it's just hard to do Thunderbolt well, or if there are fundmental problems in the design of Thunderbolt, because the level of support for Thunderbolt has been really underwhelming so far, and lots of companies have over-promised and under-delivered.
UPDATES
Some updates since this was first posted:
- → On April 17th 2013, I wrote about the Blackmagic MultiDock as a possible candidate for this space.