StarTech's New ThunderBolt Enclosure Can Carry 2 Drives

News
By Niels Broekhuijsen
published

StarTech.com's new Thunderbolt-based drive enclosure can hold two hard drives or SSDs.

StarTech.com has announced a new Thunderbolt-based drive enclosure, and this one can hold two hard drives.

The unit, known as the un-pronounceable S252SMTB3, will allow users to install up to two hard drives or SSDs, each with a capacity of up to 2 TB. The unit is based on the Thunderbolt 1.0 specification, meaning that it has a maximum transfer rate of up to 10 Gb/s.

"Our Thunderbolt Enclosure offers the best possible user experience, with lightning-fast transfer speeds, a sleek design and dependable performance," said Juliet Wei, Senior Product Manager for StarTech.com's External Drive Enclosure product line. "This enclosure can help create the ideal solution for any high-capacity, external storage application, and includes a 1-meter Thunderbolt cable which provides hassle-free setup right out of the box, without the expense of a necessary cable."

StarTech.com has given the unit an MSRP price of $327, and it will be available through mainstream retailers and e-tailers soon.

Niels Broekhuijsen
Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

8 Comments Comment from the forums
  • user 18
    Hope it comes with drives for that price....
    Reply
  • amk-aka-Phantom
    Thunderbolt is USELESS for hard drives since they can't exceed 125 MB/s at best. USB 3.0 is good enough for these. And actually, even for most SSDs.Thunderbolt started off as a beacon of hope to FINALLY have external graphics cards. It was bastardized to yet another interface to connect external drives (for which it's unsuitable because it's too expensive and rare) and screens (I DO believe that HDMI and DisplayPort are quite enough for that!). It's very sad to see that people are BSd into buying that useless stuff.
    Reply
  • bigpinkdragon286
    Thunderbolt started as a nice idea, but at this point it's shaping up to be a solution in search of a problem since Intel seems to have restricted direct Thunderbolt to PCI Express adapters, making external graphics cards unfortunately very do-it-yourself.
    Reply
  • torbendalum
    Just why would you use thunderbolt for external graphics ? it is way to slow for that.10Gb/s is 1192MB/s that is almost only the same as a single pcie v3 lane 986 MB/s that will slow down a graphis card, they nomally have a band with of 15.75 GB/s to play with in a 16 lane slot.
    Reply
  • jasonelmore
    Why in the hell is it over $300? the tray price for that controller is $5.Hell even the brand new Thunderbolt 2.0 controller has a tray price of $10http://ark.intel.com/products/76721/Intel-DSL5520-Thunderbolt-2-ControllerThey could pack in 4 of those bad boys in one of these enclosures and sell it for $100 and still make plenty of money.Someone needs to buck the trend and end this madness
    Reply
  • bigpinkdragon286
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RTkNJDMzugActually, Gigabyte has shown an external enclosure using a pair of Thunderbolt 2 links. That brings the speed up to beyond where a PCIe 2.0 x4 link would be, which has been shown to only hinder performance by about 5% in most single card cases. Just because graphics cards are given 16 lanes at PCIe 3.0 speeds, doesn't mean they have a use for all of that bandwidth yet. The point is to allow a wider array of configuration options for people who purchase laptops or low powered desktops, but as jasonelmore pointed out, Thunderbolt is hardly being used to make cost-effective devices.The majority of Thunderbolt connectors are on Apple devices, and from the look of the device pictured, I would suspect the manufacturer wants to take advantage of that crowd.
    Reply
  • Darkk
    No thunderbolt 2?
    Reply
  • bigpinkdragon286
    Thunderbolt 2 simply gangs the two bi-directional 10 Gb/s channels of the original Thunderbolt together so it has enough bandwidth to carry 4k video, it doesn't actually bring a bunch of new features or speed to the table, and there is no way a spinning platter storage device could come close to saturating Thunderbolt of any kind, so there is no need for Thunderbolt 2.
    Reply