Orico presents a new series of Thunderbolt hard drive enclosures
Andy Ruffell / 13 years ago
Even though not being very diffused, Intel’s Thunderbolt interconnect proposing up to 10 Gbps of bandwidth is still being brought into use by no other then Apple. Companies like Orico also see potential and as a result, have announced a new range of product featuring the above mentioned technology.
The Chinese company has announced five new disk boxes featuring Thunderbolt connectivity, although Orico is only showing it to those working into CGI renders. For now, it’s offered in four variants: single drive, two drives, four drives and five drives.
The single drive version only features one Thunderbolt port, meaning it can only act either as a standalone external hard drive or close a Thunderbolt daisy-chain.
The remaining three, on the other hand, do feature two Thunderbolt port, giving the ability to arrange them in internodes in a Thunderbolt daisy-chain. This is where the 10 Gbps comes into place. While most people would argue that it’s over rated, such a large bandwidth actually allows all those disks to work in chain without any bottlenecks when accessing the drives, whether being only one of multiple. Another great feature is that you can hot-plug the enclosures without disturbing the rest of the drives in operation.
The enclosures are made of aluminium and feature passive cooling vents on the rear. Each drive has its own pop-out cradle to pull the drive upwards, while on the front each drive has its own power-activity blue LED. When the drive is in place the LED will be on, but it will blink when in operation. The power is supplied through an external power brick and can be turned on or off from a hard power switch on the back, placed next to the power input and the single or double Thunderbolt connection (depending on model).
While Orico didn’t give any time of release, neither did they give any price for that matter, it’s very likely that they will start off on their own east Asian market until expanding worldwide.
