Use the 4 drives from your old Mac Pro with your new Mac Pro in a new Thunderbolt enclosure from Promise.

The Promise Pegasus2 R4 “Diskless” System lets us remove the 4 drives from an old Mac Pro tower and put them into the 4 drive trays of the Pegasus2 for Thunderbolt access on new Mac Pros and MacBook Pros.

We popped the drives in, plugged in the Thunderbolt cable, and the 4 drives painlessly appeared on the desktop the way they did in the past — as 4 separate icons. This JBOD mode (Just a Bunch Of Disks) is called Pass-Thru Mode by Promise, and it worked by default without any scary setup.

Promise calls this thing “Diskless” — they could call it BYOD – bring your own disks. You can purchase similar Pegasuses with drives and with more bays.

The drives go to sleep and wake up when the computer does. I think this could prove to be a very useful download-storage-cloning-backup data wrangling center for DITs on-set, dailies creators near-set, and editors evderywhere.

FDTimes had moved (“migrated,” “meandered”?) data to the LaCie 5big Thunderbolt (20 TB)  storage cube a few weeks ago. This solved the problem of where to put all those drives that previously lived inside the old Mac Pro but now were living like snails without their shells outside the new MacBook Pro and the yet to arrive new Mac Pro.

The only quibble was that pulling the old drives out of the old MacPro and installing them inside the with the LaCie 5big voided the warranty unless you purchased LaCie spare drives from 2 to 4 TB in hot-swappable trays.

Promise Pegasus2 R4 “Diskless” System is another excellent choice.