[l008com]

I'm in love with these Promise 6 bay SATA drive towers that have thunderbolt connections. I can't wait to get a 6-bay tower for my home, and I can't wait to start hooking up strings of them to Mac minis, to make some great file servers.

BUT the big question I have (besides "when will empty drive-less be available") is, does SMART work over thunderbolt? SMART does not work over USB or FireWire drives. But if I'm going to be managing Macs with this many hard drives attached, SMART really becomes somewhat of a necessity. Random swapping & troubleshooting with this many drives just won't be practical. If I have 12 hard drives hooked up to one machine, I really need to be able to launch SMART Utility and see at a glance, which drives are running normally and which are having issues.

[mduell]

Thunderbolt is just a way to expose a PCIe bus remotely. It's orthogonal to a particular SMART utility working or not.

If the storage device is just a SATA controller that exposes the SATA drives individually to the OS, various SMART utilities should work fine.

If the storage device does some sort of aggregation (RAID or mere concatenation), you'll need a SMART utility from the device vendor (generally part of the RAID management software).