Akitio releases red Node Lite Thunderbolt 3 drive with fast Intel Optane SSD

Akitio has announced the immediate availability of their latest Thunderbolt 3 device, the bright red Node Lite that comes equipped with a 960GB Intel Optane NVMe SSD with speeds up to 2600 MB/s.

After being available for a couple years, more and more Thunderbolt 3 devices have been coming to market. The Node Lite enclosure has been around for a bit, though the new color and Optane storage pre-built are new.

The red Node Lite has an aluminum enclosure with a transparent acrylic side that shows off bright LEDs of the exposed SSD as well as the inner workings of the enclosure. Ports include a pair of Thunderbolt 3 ports, a dedicated DisplayPort, and the power jack.

Leveraging Thunderbolt 3, up to six devices can be daisy chained together. By including a dedicated DisplayPort, the second Thunderbolt 3 port can be used for connecting other drives, eGPUs, a monitor, or other peripherals.

For storage, Akitio is bundling the Intel Optane 905P 960GB PCIe SSD that can handle 2.6 Gigabytes per second read speed, and 2.2 Gigabytes per second write speed. Of course, real world usage can vary.

Apple first included Thunderbolt 3 on the 2016 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, and has been including it on more machines ever since.

The Special Edition red Node Lite with 960GB Intel Optane SSD 905P is available from Amazon for $1499.99. If you like the enclosure, but don't need the Intel Optane SSD or the red color scheme, you can pick up the PCI-E Node Lite Thunderbolt 3 enclosure for $198.99.

20 Comments

mdriftmeyer 7395 comments · 20 Years

About 6 years ago

A product looking for a problem to solve.

Soli 9981 comments · 9 Years

That enclosure looks huge for its capacity. Is there really that much heat from the faster read/writes that it can't be powered by TB3 alone and needs to be that large?

Great if you need 4x the speed* and don't mind paying 5x the price for a bulkier option over something like the Samsung T5 Portable SSD.

* With other bottlenecks in a system I wonder what the real world advantage is for using this drive.

sflocal 6133 comments · 16 Years

Soli said:

That enclosure looks huge for its capacity. Is there really that much heat from the faster read/writes that it can't be powered by TB3 alone and needs to be that large?

Great if you need 4x the speed* and don't mind paying 5x the price for a bulkier option over something like the Samsung T5 Portable SSD.

* With other bottlenecks in a system I wonder what the real world advantage is for using this drive.

I am absolutely confused by this product. Why the huge chassis for what is essentially an SSD drive? Is it because of the Thunderbolt circuitry that requires that much more real-estate?

It may be 5x the price of the Samsung T5, but then again, the throughput is almost 5x that of the Samsung drive so it's relative. I'm all for faster speeds as I love my Promise Thunderbolt2 drive array, but this is some pricey stuff for what I think is not very much storage capacity.

scottw2 20 comments · 9 Years

I really want to know what such a fast storage is useful for. It hugely impresses on the benchmarks, but what kind of workload does it actually improve. (Legitimate question. Not trolling).

scottw2 said:

I really want to know what such a fast storage is useful for. It hugely impresses on the benchmarks, but what kind of workload does it actually improve. (Legitimate question. Not trolling).

At one time I would've loved to have a faster option for moving up to a TB of data to client servers and PC for a restore via images that I kept. This would absolutely make it faster over the HDD that I kept, but I'm not sure it would be worth the extra power cable, the bulk, and price over more contained SSDs that are 1/4 the price since it's still be moved though other slow interfaces, which typically also meant copying to an HDD which is the slowest option in the chain. Now, if you're coming to another very fast SSD that exceeds the speeds of other solutions, like the aforementioned T5, it would likely speed things up. The larger the transfer the more time is saved, and if you bill the same for a client and you can see more clients I can see how it could be worthwhile.