CalDigit are about to start shipping their new Thunderbolt connected RAID array, the T3, which can be fitted with three Hard drives or SSDs and can reach speeds of up to 850MB/s
Building on the success of their T1 single bay arrays and T2 dual bay arrays CalDigit have announced that their new T3 three bay RAID arrays will begin shipping from January 6th 2014 and are available for pre-order now.
The T3 is a three bay Thunderbolt connected RAID chassis which can be fitted with Hard drives, SSDs or even a combination of the two. The drives can be configured as RAID 0, RAID 1 or JBOD or you can have two drives in a RAID configuration and the third drive as an individual drive unit for maximum flexibility.
The T3 can be configured with 2TB, 3TB or 4TB hard drives to give 6TB, 9TB or 12TB of storage depending on the RAID configuration. With SSDs the current maximum is 2.88TB but that should increase as higher capacity SSD's arrive in the market.
With three SSDs installed the T3 can reach speeds of 850MB/s read and 800MB/s write whilst with Hard drives the figures are 550MB/s read and 500MB/s write which is still very good for a small RAID.
"To put the T3's performance into context, dual bay RAID solutions typically achieve speeds of 300MB/s, four bay RAID solutions achieve 500MB/s, and six bay RAID solutions achieve 800MB/s. The CalDigit T3 with just three drives can achieve speeds of 850MB/s in a smaller and more compact form-factor", said Kosta Panagos, Director of Marketing at CalDigit.
Housed in a smart extruded aluminium chassis the T3 has two Thunderbolt ports so up to six units can be daisy chained together giving up to 72TB of capacity or they can be linked to other Thunderbolt devices.
The drive modules of the T3 are removable so it is simple to swap drives and in fact it uses the same drive modules as other CalDigit arrays so making it easy to move drives from one system to another.
The CalDigit T3 is available to pre-order now from the CalDigit Online Store. It will be available soon through CalDigit Resellers worldwide, and Amazon. Pricing for the CalDigit T3 starts at $749 MSRP in the US, £475 RRP in the UK, and €575 RRP in Europe for the 6TB 3.5" HDD version.