Intel's Thunderbolt 3 announcement was a hot topic at this year's Computex, but it will be a while until we see working products in the field. A trip through the Areca Technology Corporation booth highlighted some of the interesting storage-centric products on the market in the already-mature Thunderbolt 2 ecosystem. Thunderbolt 3 is purportedly coming to market by the end of the year, but these things take time. Fortunately, Areca's products have a modular design that supports an upgrade to the new specification via a simple module swap.
The ARC-8050T2 supports eight 6 Gbps HDDs and SSDs. This enclosure also supports multiple RAID levels and features two Thunderbolt 3 ports. On the monitor we see three of Areca's Thunderbolt 2-to-PCIe expansion boxes. These boxes connect to multiple types of storage fabrics, such as 16 Gbps Fibre Channel, 6 Gbps SAS and 12 Gbps SAS. The boxes convert the signal out to two Thunderbolt 2 ports that support daisy-chaining.
The converter boxes allow users to connect multiple types of storage JBODs and enclosures into one central Thunderbolt fabric, as seen at the rear of the display. As the market moves to Thunderbolt 3 over the next several years, Areca will offer its customers the ability to simply upgrade existing models to the new specification.
