Nicely designed, easy to set up
By Lawrence I. Charters
September 5, 2015
Most modern computers come with fairly modest internal storage. For some people, half a terabyte of storage seems huge, but if you are a photographer, graphic artist, web manager, or other information-intensive user, it is not enough. I was looking for something more.
The Akitio Thunder2 Quad is a RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Devices) enclosure designed to hold four drives. The “Thunder2” part of the name indicates that it uses Thunderbolt 2.0, the 20 gigabit per second interface developed by Intel and Apple for external peripherals. The enclosure comes with mounting plates and screws, and includes a second Thunderbolt 2.0 port so that you can daisy-chain multiple Thunderbolt devices. It has a large, quiet fan, and an unobtrusive blue light indicating it is powered up and accessible.
I’d never heard of Akitio, the brand, but it is nicely designed, easy to set up, requires no special software (you can use Apple’s Disk Utility to format drives and RAID them), and is fast. No complaints.