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Thunder SATA Go

This article is a translation based on Stanley's review at MACUKNOW.

"Hey, what's this?" asked Stanley, when he borrowed an AKiTiO Thunder2 Quad from AKiTiO for a review.

He saw this little gadget laying on a table, thinking it is some kind of card reader but as it turned out, this is actually an eSATA to Thunderbolt adapter with two eSATA 6Gbps ports.

Perhaps you still have one of those earlier external drives with multiples interfaces including eSATA, USB 2.0 and FireWire 800?

Nick Jensen

“The Thunder2 Quad is amazing with GH4 4K scrubbing. Insane speed.”, states Nick Jensen from Floline Media while using the AKiTiO Thunder2 Quad.

“The AKiTiO Thunder2 Quad is solid build quality and crazy fast. Being a PC based video editor, fast external RAID options are not readily available. The Thunder2Quad was easy to setup on my MSI WS60 laptop in Windows 8.1. AKiTiO's website and drivers were easy to navigate and use.”

“The AKiTiO Thunder2 Quad handles my Panasonic GH4 4K footage with ease in Adobe Premiere CC. Being able to scrub clips with minimal dropped frames has been a blessing. It also handled 3 days of capturing a live event from a Blackmagic Intensity Thunderbolt interface, daisy chained in uncompressed HD without any problems. I am currently running 4 - 1TB Western Digital Black, 7200rpm's and getting peaks just above 600mb/s. I love having the option of a future SSD upgrade. The AKiTiO was one of the best purchases I made for my 4K workflow.”

Hydra Super-S LCM

As of January 1, 2015, the Hydra Super-S LCM has been discontinued and this model is no longer being manufactured, sold or maintained.

The Hydra Super-S LCM was a 4-bay storage enclosure with built-in hardware RAID designed for up to four 3.5" hard disk drives. It featured a 4-in-1 interface with eSATA, FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0.

There is no new version available for this particular model. As an alternative, please consider the Taurus Super-S3 LCM, a 2-bay storage enclosure that also comes with a built-in RAID controller and similar interfaces, including eSATA, FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB 3.0.

Jacek Milaszewski

We are always interested and also just a little proud to see our products in use by our customers. It helps us to learn what we have done right, see what can be improved and gives us fresh ideas for new products. If you don't mind sharing how your own workspace looks like, please send us a picture of your setup with a few details about the equipment that is used. Of course, any comments, positive or negative, are welcome too.

In this article, Jacek, a mixing engineer has installed a Pro Tools HD Native PCIE card in the AKiTiO Thunder2 PCIe Box, saying "HD Native PCIe works great in Akitio Thunderbolt enclosure connected to 2013 iMac"

Raymond Singer

"This little guy ACTUALLY WORKS THE WAY YOU EXPECT IT TO!", states Raymond Singer from Cut to the Story Films while using the AKiTiO Thunder Dock.

“Just like you probably were, I was pretty stoked to add a nifty iMac to my editing suite. Even more excited to plug in a first generation Mac Pro. What a screamer. And Thunderbolt? Wow, love that Promise RAID! But holy catfish, Batman, what to do with my trusty SATA RAIDs?! Are they on their way to a garage sale? Paperweights maybe? How do I get all my files over to the new Thunderbolt RAID?! Then there’s the material that’s coming in from clients on USB3 drives. I’m running out of ports! And don’t even get me started on those FireWire 800 drives that are on the shelf or that clients bring their footage on.”

“OK, no problem. There are a few Thunderbolt hubs that give you USB ports, maybe a FireWire 800, too. Some give you an audio and Ethernet port. (If you know why you’d actually need those ports, please share your thoughts with me.) I tried ‘em. All. Each one’s a little different, but they do seem to share one thing in common. In my experience, they all fail. They burn out. They have weak power supplies. Some are actually noisy. (I don’t know how a hub can be noisy, but there you are.) Bottom line — they’re unreliable. The last thing I need in my edit suite is an unreliable piece of gear.”