A curious combination of Thunderbolt dock and external RAID box
Orico Data Matrix Pro: 30-second review
The Orico brand is well-considered for its inexpensive range of external drive enclosures, but the Orico Data Matrix Mini products are a significant diversion.
There are three options: the Data Matrix Elite, Data Matrix Pro, and Data Matrix Ultra, with one, two, or five hard drives mounted internally.
Thunderbolt technology connects the PC or Apple Mac, and each of these external drives incorporates a Thunderbolt hub, enabling five of them to be daisy-chained for a substantial amount of capacity.
All these units are supplied with drives pre-installed, negating the possibility of finding a deal on storage. All units come with conventional SATA drives and a single M.2 SSD, and the capacities of these are combined for no obvious good reason.
Therefore, the Data Matrix Elite can come with a 4TB, 8TB, 16TB, and 22TB drive and with a 1TB SSD, making for total capacities of 5TB, 9TB, 17TB and 23TB.
The Matrix Pro can have 10TB, 18TB, 34TB or 46TB, as it comes with a 2TB SSD. The Matrix Ultra is available with 42TB, 82TB or a whopping 112TB, and it also has a 2TB SSD.
But, here’s where things start to go South. Orico put these devices on Kickstarter, where the Data Matrix Elite starts at $699 for a 5TB model, going up to $4999 for the 112TB model.
While the SSD is user-upgradable, the internal hard drives aren’t accessible for replacement or upgrades. The drive configuration of the unit is set by dip switches before use, and once those drives are formatted, they can’t be altered without erasing them.
Other than increasing the size of the SSD, the only option that the user has is to set the drives as RAID 0, 1, spanned or JBOD. In theory, it might be possible to combine multiple units using software RAID on the computer, and that would offer greater performance but trade the reliability should any of the units or drives fail.
As an ex-IT professional, there is so much about this setup that represents a red flag. I’d recommend looking at what TerraMaster offers in external Thunderbolt storage arrays before backing this Kickstarter.Orico Data Matrix Pro: Price and availability
How much does it cost? From around $699
When is it out? Available now
Where can you get it? Pledges on Kickstarter
Kickstarter isn’t a promotional tool, and Orico doesn’t need the extra investment to make this product a reality.
The Data Matrix Elite line starts at $699 for a 4TB WD Red and an unbranded 1TB SSD, which would cost around $160 if bought separately. You could achieve the same experience with a $200 Thunderbolt hub and two drive enclosures, which would cost at most another $100. That’s $460 of technology with a Kickstarter price of $699 in a heavy aluminium box.
At the most expensive end of the spectrum, the Matrix Ultra with 112TB has a 2TB SSD ($150), five 22TB WD Red drives ($450 each = $2250), and a $200 Thunderbolt dock. That makes roughly $2600 of hardware for a $4999 investment. These quoted numbers are retail costs, not what Orico would pay for OEM technology.
There are numerous ways to connect this capacity by Thunderbolt, including the TerraMaster D5, the enclosure of which is only $699.99. It can deliver a similar option for around $3000 for the D5 and drives when configured.
Making this specifically for Apple Mac users seems to have affected the price of the Data Matrix devices.Orico Data Matrix Pro: SpecsOrico Data Matrix Pro: Design
A Thunderbolt Dock with drives
No drive replacements
Single SSD
For our assessment, Orico sent us an engineering sample of the Data Matrix Pro with a single 1TB SSD and two 4TB WD Red hard drives.
