On the high-end side, we have the S354SMTB2R, a 4-bay Thunderbolt 2 enclosure with a price point just south of $700. Since the beginning of the year, has launched two interesting products in the DAS (direct-attached storage) space. hopes to differentiate itself by acting as a one-stop shop for all these miscellaneous needs. Technology-wise, there are plenty of similar options in the market. We have reviewed a few of their products such as the USB 3.0 to SATA IDE HDD docking station and portable SATA duplicator before. specializes in gadgets performing niche, yet handy functions. These JMicron parts have been discontinued and new parts have been introduced for economical multi-bay direct-attached storage enclosures. A couple of years have passed since we checked out the JMicron JMB321 port-multiplier coupled with a JSM 539 SATA to USB 3.0 bridge.
The last time we looked at a multi-bay external enclosure was in our review of the Mediasonic Probox. The advent of high-speed interfaces such as USB 3.x and Thunderbolt have enabled a new generation of DAS units that enable the host system to access the member disks without any bottlenecks. Direct Attached Storage (DAS) units have been the go-to devices for consumers looking to store large amounts of data, though they are being slowly replaced by Network Attached Storage (NAS) units in certain scenarios.
