Drobo announces 5D Thunderbolt/USB3 Storage device with mSATA built-in (http://9to5mac.com/2012/06/21/drobo-announces-5d-thunderboltusb3-storage-device-with-msata-built-in/)

http://www.drobo.com/images/products/5d-left.png

Drobo 5D is equipped with dual Thunderbolt ports for daisy chaining. Connect up to six Thunderbolt devices and/or a non-Thunderbolt monitor at the end of the chain. With six Drobo 5D arrays in a chain, you can have up to 96 TB of usable capacity. And, the bi-directional 10 Gbps performance of Thunderbolt allows all devices in the chain to achieve maximum throughput.

Most interesting is the mSATA add on which purports to increase performance

(9to5mac (http://9to5mac.com/2012/06/21/drobo-announces-5d-thunderboltusb3-storage-device-with-msata-built-in/))

Being it is Drobo I can only imagine how much it is going to cost...

I read that it would be $799 on the verge. Pretty pricy.

Is the thunderbolt just going to improve transfer for multiple devices connected? Thunderbolt moves much much faster then a hard drive can transfer right?

>Thunderbolt moves much much faster then a hard drive can transfer right?

When you RAID drives together, you increase the bandwidth that the drive array can handle. A single hard drive can about saturate a Firewire 800 connection, while a RAID array can easily outperform Firewire 800 (about 800 Mbps -- approx 80 MB/s), or even a single eSATA connection. eSATA comes in 6.0 Gbps and 3.0 Gbps versions -- but practically speaking about 250 MB/s when using a single eSATA 6.0 port on a single-lane PCI-E eSATA card. (It can get faster with a more expensive 4-lane card and by using multiple ports in parallel).

Thunderbolt provides two bi-directional channels with 10 Gbps -- approx 1000 MB/s (in each direction.

Being it is Drobo I can only imagine how much it is going to cost...

..and how slow it will be. Drobo is junk.

..and how slow it will be. Drobo is junk.

Shhh... Don't upset the supporters... bad enough they have to pay so much so you shouldn't rub it in by talking about quality.... not to mention that their manner of "saving data" is propitiatory and so you have to have one of their techs solve a problem instead of being able to deal with it yourself or have any tech who deals with REAL RAID not fake RAID (like Drobo sells) issues....

Hmm so I think I'll steer clear from Drobo drives for that file server I was talking about!