Thunder3 RAID Station With Seagate 2TB Iron Wolf Pro HDD by Akitio

Akitio announced an expansion of their storage product offerings – to integrate HDDs into select the firm’s storage enclosures.

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The expansion creates a line of products for the company as previously the firm sold only unpopulated enclosures.

The first enclosure that will be available with drives will be the Thunder3 RAID Station and it will be populated with two Seagate Technology plc‘s 2TB Iron Wolf Pro drives. The company also plans to offer higher capacity drives and also incorporate them into other firm’s enclosures.

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This product expansion makes company’s products even flexible than they already were by offering consumers and businesses the option of purchasing either a populated, plug and play storage solution or an empty enclosure and installing their own drives.

“We are very excited about this new offering as many of our customer have asked us to offer complete storage solutions with drives optimized for maximum performance and reliability. Offering the customer expanded options helps Akitio be more competitive in the ever-growing external storage market,” said Richard Wright, VP, sales and marketing, Akitio.

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The Thunder3 RAID Station is a Thunderbolt 3 two-bay hardware RAID storage enclosure that also features several other I/O ports making it a storage device and also a docking station. It features an SD card slot on the front of the unit. On the rear of the unit there is a dedicated DisplayPort for adding a second monitor, a GbE LAN port, two USB 3.1 Gen1 host ports and two Thunderbolt 3 USB Type-C ports for connecting to a laptop and daisy-chaining additional devices.

The two IronWolf drives can be configured to become two independent disks, or become a single RAID-0 or RAID-1 storage space by the RAID controller which is built into the RAID Station. The RAID Station also provides 27W of power to recharge laptops.

The 4TB RAID Station with two 2TB Iron Wolf Pro HDDs is expected to hit the market in early February 2018.

Pricing will be at $619.99 for the 4TB model and the empty enclosure will be priced at $369.99.

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