Thunder Dock (Thunderbolt Cable Included)

Works ok, gets a bit warm. Enoying that the ports are spread, and not all on the same side, it makes clutter on my desk. The disks connected to it, does not spin down/power off when i power off my Mac.

UPDATE - MAR15: These need a firmware update - they work sometimes and other times they do not recognize the drives using Seat and Thunderbolt on New MacPro. I found another review which described what I have experienced and copied a sequence of power-up and connect that seems to work...here is what you must do to get these to work:The dock may be timing out its detection routine before all the drives get a chance to spin up.This I suspect because having slowest spinup drive positioned in tower toreceive power 1st seems to also be necessaryThe sequence of powering up that seems to allow all 8 drives to mount is convoluted.Power up external 8 bay towerPower up Akitio dockReboot MacEject all drives from desktopDetach Thunderbolt cableAttach Thunderbolt cable (this might be telling Akitio to re-detect drives)Let drives mount to desktop (still, only SOME will mount at this point)Reboot <--- you may need to do this more than onceFinally all 8 drives mountBTW, the dock will get very hot, but that was solved by putting 5 mm thick, rubber feet under it. The improved circulation keeps it much cooler.MY OLDER INITIAL REVIEW:I primarily bought this to connect my 4 DROBO S eSATA drives for my New Mac Pro 2014. Truial and error allowed me to discover you have to disconnect the Thunderbolt Cable to get these AKITO's to recognize any eSATA drives. Next problem DROBO does not recognize the DROBO Drives when interfaces through this device. Overall very disappointed. I do not recommend these at all. Total Waste of money if you are using eSATA...UPDATE MAY 2014: OK now having worked with two of these devices for a while - here is what you must do. You SOMETIMES need to Power your Mac, then plug power into these devices - Power up your external eSATA Drives...THEN connect the Thunderbolt. If you follow this sequence the device works reliably. It gets hot - so I added a small fan....but I push it hard - let it run for 20-48 hours non-stop. I do recommend this unit... Maybe Thunderbolt is so new that Apple needs to add a power up sequence patch. Until then do it manually and these eSATA - THUNDERBOLT interfaces work very well.

Hooked up to a 2011 MacMini, which was a transition machine that has Thunderbolt but only usb2. This gives me 2 esata and 2 usb3 ports plus an extra FW800. Port multiplier works well with a Mediasonic ProBox 4 bay under both esata and usb3. 2 drives are in a software RAID 0, the other two are independent. Also see both drives in my Thermaltake BlacX Duet under esata. Does seem to get a bit hot, but performs well.

thunderbolt display, thunderbolt to thunder dock, one usb3 5TB disk, 1 usb mouse ... Only 50% of the attachment used, yet the heat coming off the device is ridiculous. It's on very cold surface M3 docking station on the bottom on top of the metal aluminum piece... Yet the heat coming off this thing is not dissipating. It gets so hot!.... beware, you will need a dedicated fan to cool this thing off... On top of the that, my mac air is constantly over heating since I have attached it. I am not liking it one bit!

Runs a little hot. It adds usb3 or esata capability to your thunderbolt devices, that's it. Only recommended for older Apple devices that don't have usb 3. I think it is overpriced for what it does. Obsolete for all new Apple devices with USB 3

eSata drives are not recognized. They show up as blank, uninitialized drives. Same enclosure has USB 2.0 ports, when I connect it using USB 2.0 the drives are recognized (even when connected to Akitio's USB ports). But via Akitio eSata they are not recognized. I tried powering up the disks before connecting the TB cable, no joy. This is a deal breaker. The reason I order this Thunderbolt dock is because it has eSata. Unless there is a good solution (may be firmware update?) I will have to return it.Update 3: it turns out the SATA problem is due to a bug in the enclosure firmware. I had to reformat the drive using the SATA and everything is working fine. And both SATA ports are good.Thunderbolt cable is so short! Very difficult to use this unless you put everything on your desk. I wanted to put everything out of sight and only have the Thunderbolt cable. But I cannot do that with the cable provided.Performance:On the positive side, I tested performance over USB 3.0. I got the same numbers as I get when I run the disk performance test directly connected my Macbook Pro's USB 3.0 ports as the disk connected to the USB 3.0 port of Akitio. I am getting ~120 MB/s, tested with 2 different enclosures/drives (which is 960 mega bits/second). I am happy with the USB 3.0 performanceUpdate 3: so the SATA and FW800 performance tests revealed results inline with SATA disk performance (in my case the bottle neck was the 5400 RPM SATA II drives. The FW800 gave near the theoretical performance.I am upping the rating to 4 stars.

I bought this to go with my new 2013 MacPro. I had two major problems with the Akitio Thunder Dock. 1. if the computer goes to sleep it will not reconnect to eSata connected drives. 2. If the computer goes to sleep the log files will spew with Firewire bus errors, and I mean a lot of them. To Akitio's credit their customer service is very responsive and offered to RMA to fix the firewire problem. But, if you look around, they have known about this problem for a while, and new products being sold still have the problem. For both of these reasons I have just returned it and will just replace my eSata enclosures with something else.