# New MultiDock with USB-C



## charlieclouser (Apr 8, 2019)

aaaaaand THERE it is. BlackMagic Design announced today the update to their beloved MultiDock rack-mount enclosure for 4x 2.5" SATA SSD drives. The new one has the same design with no fans or other moving parts (not even a power switch) but instead of Thunderbolt v1 or v2 it now has dual USB-C ports.

Actually, there is one moving part - a switch allows you to have two of the drive bays on each of the two USB-C ports, or gang all four bays to a single port. 

Not sure if those USB-C ports are pass-through ports that allow the MultiDock to live in the middle of a daisy-chain, or if they are dead-end ports that require it to be the last unit in a chain, or what. Also they are curiously NOT labelled as Thunderbolt3 ports, instead being referred to as "10G USB-C". But they say it's still plug-n-play on Mac and Windows with no drivers or any other software required, with the same individual SATA interface chips for each slot, but now the backplane is separate for each slot so each can be replaced if they fail due to excessive wear after thousands of daily insertions.

With the advent of m2 enclosures the SATA game is no longer the fastest in town but the convenience of quickly swapping 2.5" drives is great for some applications, and the price is right at $595 list.

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicmultidock


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## sourcefor (Apr 8, 2019)

Hey Charlie let me ask a question, do you ever get midi time out errors and if so what do you do about them!? Thanks!


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## D Halgren (Apr 8, 2019)

Isn't the 10Gb/s slower than the original Thunderbolt 2 20Gb/s? What an odd choice.


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## charlieclouser (Apr 8, 2019)

sourcefor said:


> Hey Charlie let me ask a question, do you ever get midi time out errors and if so what do you do about them!? Thanks!



Nope, never seen that error. Never heard of it actually. I'm on Logic v10.2.4 on MacOS Yosemite.


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## charlieclouser (Apr 8, 2019)

D Halgren said:


> Isn't the 10Gb/s slower than the original Thunderbolt 2 20Gb/s? What an odd choice.



Yeah, not sure what's up with that. However, even at 10Gb/sec it's way faster than the four 500mb/sec drive bays can shovel down the wire at one time. Maybe the switch to plain old USB-C as opposed to Thunderbolt3 makes it compatible with a wider range of non-Apple hosts, while still letting it operate beyond the needed speeds when connected to an Apple TB3 port.


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## D Halgren (Apr 8, 2019)

charlieclouser said:


> Yeah, not sure what's up with that. However, even at 10Gb/sec it's way faster than the four 500mb/sec drive bays can shovel down the wire at one time. Maybe the switch to plain old USB-C as opposed to Thunderbolt3 makes it compatible with a wider range of non-Apple hosts, while still letting it operate beyond the needed speeds when connected to an Apple TB3 port.


Yeah, it must be some non-Apple consideration. Still, USB4 is already queued up, I was really hoping for Thunderbolt3.


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## Jack Weaver (Apr 8, 2019)

Probably a trick question, but are there any m2 external enclosures that handle 4 drives and plugs into TB2 or TB3? (or even USB-3?)

Thanks.

.


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## D Halgren (Apr 8, 2019)

Jack Weaver said:


> Probably a trick question, but are there any m2 external enclosures that handle 4 drives and plugs into TB2 or TB3? (or even USB-3?)
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> .


https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB3EX4M2SL/

Found this, and now I want it...


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## Jack Weaver (Apr 8, 2019)

Ooooooo......

.


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## Jack Weaver (Apr 8, 2019)

Only slight caveats for the OWC Express 4M2 4-Slot m2 NVM3 SSD Enclosure:

- You need to at least have macOS 10.12 - 


SSDs using 512b sector sizes require macOS 10.13 or later._(I'm not sure if that means having larger sector sizes that you could have 10.12. Maybe someone can chime in here.)_

Host computers with a Thunderbolt or Thunderbolt 2 port require the Apple Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter.

Does not support Dual-Mode DisplayPort (DP++). Adaptable to HDMI, DVI, and VGA via active adapters. Supports Multi-Stream Transport (MST), although MST is not currently supported by macOS.

This device does not support Samsung 970 EVO Plus series SSDs.


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## ironbut (Apr 8, 2019)

After obsessing about ssd enclosures, think the new Blackmagic is still going to be the most solid choice for 2.5 inch format ssd's. 
The original one was something around 390 Mb/s.
Personally, if I want something faster, the price of M.2 storage is dropping pretty fast. 
Anyway, I'm still using internal ssd's in my cheese grater (250 Mb/s) and I'm not exactly going crazy waiting for projects to load.


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## gpax (Apr 8, 2019)

charlieclouser said:


> Yeah, not sure what's up with that. However, even at 10Gb/sec it's way faster than the four 500mb/sec drive bays can shovel down the wire at one time. Maybe the switch to plain old USB-C as opposed to Thunderbolt3 makes it compatible with a wider range of non-Apple hosts, while still letting it operate beyond the needed speeds when connected to an Apple TB3 port.


I think I follow, but as I’m now using my “older” Black Magic via a TB3 adapter with my shiny new 2019 iMac, are you saying the new BMD speed advantage is because of shoveling 10 Gb/sec X 2 - per the option to split this on the new BMD? 

I think in my case, as the TB3/USB-C is a shared port, wouldn’t this add up the same as the 20 Gb sec I’m seeing now? Or am I missing something here?

Edit: * I should say theoretical 20 GB/sec


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## lp59burst (Apr 8, 2019)

D Halgren said:


> https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB3EX4M2SL/
> 
> Found this, and now I want it...


At first glance it appears to be that, if fully loaded, all four drives would share one lane of the T3's 4 lane PCIe bus architecture so max is 2800/4 or ~700mb/s per M.2 NVMe SSD. If you RAID 0'd all four of them together then you'd potentially get closer to the theoretical 2800mb/s.

But, as always, I could very well be wrong about that...


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## charlieclouser (Apr 8, 2019)

gpax said:


> I think I follow, but as I’m now using my “older” Black Magic via a TB3 adapter with my shiny new 2019 iMac, are you saying the new BMD speed advantage is because of shoveling 10 Gb/sec X 2 - per the option to split this on the new BMD?
> 
> I think in my case, as the TB3/USB-C is a shared port, wouldn’t this add up the same as the 20 Gb sec I’m seeing now? Or am I missing something here?
> 
> Edit: * I should say theoretical 20 GB/sec



I don't think there will be any speed advantage to the new MultiDock. It's still using the same old SATA technology to serve up the drives, and I doubt that we'll see any 2.5" SATA drives that go much beyond 500mb/sec, so the bus is always gonna be way faster than the slots, even with all four churning at full tilt. It's just nice to have an option that doesn't need any adaptors to connect to recent Mac computers, and can probably connect to a wider variety of Windows machines that might have USB-C but not TB.


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## oedipusdaedalus (Oct 30, 2019)

Can anyone confirm that when you are using it in "4 disk mode", the other usb-c port functions as a usb passthrough?


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## Dom (Nov 29, 2019)

Does anyone know how this could be connected to a 2013 trashcan Mac? Thunderbolt adapters?


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## thekrynn (Nov 30, 2019)

I too would like to know if this is compatible with TB2 machines like the 2013 trashcan while waiting to upgrade to the 2019 version. Anyone with one of these able to test on a TB2 machine like an older MBP?


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