Akitio has announced the $429.99 Akitio Thunder3 Quad (http://tinyurl.com/hlt8m3v), which the company says is the industry’s first 4-bay, Thunderbolt 3 storage device. It offers fast transfers with the added flexibility of a DisplayPort video output in a form factor small enough for a desktop.

The Thunder3 Quad can deliver transfer speeds of up to 1375 MB/s while simultaneously providing two 4K video streams to connected displays. It’s designed for consumers and professionals who desire high speed external storage and/or video streams in one connection, according to Akitio.

The Thunder3 Quad 4-bay enclosure features two Thunderbolt 3 Ports and a DisplayPort video output to connect to the latest 4K 60Hz displays. The second Thunderbolt 3 port on the Thunder3 Quad operates the same as a Thunderbolt 3 computer port by supporting Thunderbolt 3 (up to 5 daisy chained), USB 3.1 (10Gb/s), and DisplayPort devices. 

The four trays in the Thunder3 Quad are completely flexible in accommodating either 2.5" SSDs or HDDs, or 3.5" HDDs, offering users capacity of up to 40TB of storage with drives available in the market today. The Thunder3 Quad gives Sony Vegas and Adobe Premier users the ability to edit and playback multiple streams of HD and/or 4K content with enough headroom to daisy chain multiple 4K displays simultaneously. 

It also provides storage space for other popular applications such as Lightworks, Corel VideoStudio, Pinnacle Studio, Cakewalk, Cubase, and ProTools.  Multiple Thunder3 Quad enclosures can be daisy-chained together for even more storage capacity.