A few months ago we looked at the Blackmagic Cloud Pod 10GbE USB SSD Sharing Device. Now, it is time for the next step up, the Blackmagic Cloud Dock 2. This is a dual 10GbE NAS, with some crazy features. At the same time, it has not been the easiest to get operational even as a simple device, which is a shame. Let us get to it.
Blackmagic Cloud Dock 2 A Dual 10GbE NAS External Hardware Overview
On the front of the box, we get two spots for SSDs. The basic idea with this device is that you put two SSDs in the front and then you can access them over the network.
Smaller 7mm and 9mm SSDs fit without issue and they can be U.2 NVMe or SATA. The U.2 NVMe SSDs are necessary if you want to more or less saturate a 10GbE link. With SATA SSDs, you will likely fall short.
At first, you might think exactly what we thought: 122.88TB SSDs for massive capacity! The challenge is that while this unit supports NVMe SSDs, for some reason Blackmagic did not see it fit to allow using 15mm SSDs that are common in the enterprise and that have large capacities. This is perhaps the first challenge.
While you might think that due to the shape, other SSDs like the Kioxia FL6, CM6, and others would fit. Alas, they do not.
This is a big oversight. The large and inexpensive used data center SSDs are a great source for storage.
On the sides we get vents.
On the rear, we get our ports. There is an internal power supply, so we have an AC input. On the HDMI port labeled “monitor out” that is for monitoring, but not for administering the unit. You can see the dashboard as we will show later, but that is it.
The two 10GbE ports are really interesting. They are switched, so it seems like you can plug one into even a small switch like the MikroTik CRS304-4XG-IN and then another into a workstation, Mac Mini, or Mac Studio. Other features like LACP are not available.
The Ethernet via USB is interesting. You can connect to the device and use a USB Type-C cable to get to the storage making for a low-speed, but easy, way to access storage. We only got 5Gbps auto-negotiation on that port. On the 10GbE ports, we got consistent 10GbE-ish performance (over 800MB/s) when we used the NVMe SSD shares, but the SATA shares were nowhere near that.
Next, let us get inside the system.
It’s a neat start for a dead simple 10G NAS. I would need user management, network management, drive management, RAID 1 mirroring ability, preferably ZFS mirror but not sure about the onboard compute.
What SoC is there, under the heatsink?
I feel like this would have had a lot more potential if they optioannly allowed the use of more advanced features through some sort of HTTP-based GUI.
And added support for 15mm drives. Because I also have a pile of those. This is supposed to be a professional-grade device and nobody would have cared about a few extra mms of added height.
One could get some Thunderbolt U.2 enclosures and a NUC or some other mini PC and have a much more versatile system, although that would certainly cost a bit more, but would offer much much more flexibility.
Remember Blackmagic is a AV company and this is meant to be a ingest station for AV material. There is some standard to use 7 and 9mm SSD in cameras…
The hardware is a joke. U.2 NVMe with device support choked by the size of a slot. No info on the underlying CPU (or SoC) that powers this? Seriously. The software appears pathetic.
Honestly, the concept is fascinating but the implementation is so SO B-A-A-D.
Just to add to emmo’s comment: this wasn’t meant to be used as NAS.
It’s not for you.
BMD is AV production device company, so the sole purpose of this device is to act as huge network-attached removable media drive: camera crews use slim(!) SSDs to record footage, plug them into this thing to quickly (hence 10gbps) offload for production crew and run away for more footage. That’s it. They don’t need much security or fancy features. It’s SD drive on steroids.
I won’t buy it w/o 15mm drive support. So close!
I know what Blackmagic does – my Mac has plenty of their software, and I’m a former IATSE member. The fine article says in the title “A Dual 10GbE NAS That is Too Easy” so it’s fair to assess its use as a NAS, and even given its special circumstances, it needs more features in my opinion.
This is not a nas for computer stuff. This is for video. No one will even want to delay a production because of stupid password ! You plug the disk you record and you acces direct. no psw needed for that.
But Johnny you’ve hit the point. Even that’d need to format the drive on device instead of having to format in camera. I’d be pissed if I’ve just bought this, pugged in NVMe SSDs and I couldn’t format them in there. What about if you’re on Windows not Mac and you now have to group policy edit to access? That’s terrible.
I’m liking the concept, but you’d need 15mm, and at least basic management for users.
I don’t think this is legal in California to sell a device without a password. It’s good that the article mentions this.
@David Jashi: The problem with the security situation is that it’s so open as to actively be blocked by contemporary defaults(which have been configuration recommendations for years prior to become defaults; I don’t have the patience to verify exactly which security baseline added that; but blocking insecure guest logins has been something suggested for at least most of win10’s lifetime; along with not touching SMBv1).
Expecting this thing to play nice with every aspect of Server 2025 domain functional levels; or asking why robust CAC/PIV smartcard auth is absent would be missing the point; but adding the option to at least set up a few local users so that you don’t need to re-enable guest auth(and, ideally, could set a user to either have read only access or can-wipe-the-drive access) along with being able to lock down access to the admin interface seems like a bare minimum for a network attached, presumably multi-user, device; rather than a DAS system.
Even expecting AD integration or LDAP binding is probably misunderstanding the point of the device(though it would be nice); but there’s a significant usability gap between ‘revert to unsafe non-default’ and “first time you connect just put in username blackmagic/ password zOMGIngest and tell it to remember those credentials”.
To everyone who says that this is just an ingest device like an SD card reader.
I could agree with you on that, but then, why would anyone buy this over a 10Gbps USB U.2 dock that costs maybe $40? Or 10 of them, because that’s how much more expensive this thing is. And if you want simplicity, then you really can’t go any simpler than a local drive letter or mounting point.
To reply for some of folks here:
We ordered the Cloud Dock like almost right after it was released, waited several months for it to actually be delivered. The first thing that I thought of even before turning it on was to disassemble it with the same questions – what HW is inside, will it be able to saturate 10G? How are the network ports connected… etc. So several answers:
1/ The <12mm limitation we reported that to them via support in March24, support was useless as usual, then we met with person responsible for the Cloud product line on NAB and afterwards they at least updated the information about SSD height limitation on the website within few days.
1.5/ I have tried the 15mm drive with the enclosure disassembled and found out, that "older" NVMe drives like HGST Ultrastar SN100 will not even be recognized, probably due to older NVMe standard. Newer Kioxia CM5-V worked just "fine".
2/ Those 10G ports are actually Aquantia 10GbT chipsets bridged in SW, no HW switch… (means in future it probably could be LACPed etc…, but in the BMD spirit, it will not…)
3/ The SOC is Xilinx ZYNQ UltraScale+ XCZU4GC SFVC784AAZ
4/ It is not able to saturate even 10G from a NVMe drive, capped somewhere between 6,5-8Gbps max… (tested with CM5-V on exFAT 4K LBAF).
5/ The software is so confused, that the "ethernet" via USB-C port can be actually used as source for backing up attached drives to the cloud and it counts to the total available capacity in the HDMI monitor, but it never creates the SMB share. We also reported this weird behaviour, when it partially acts like CloudPod or CloudStore.
I ordered one specifically to aid video ingest. Like the other users, I was astonished at the lack of features. I actually have a BM cloud store, which does have security (finally!). I expected the same firmware version would do the same for the Cloud Dock. Nope.
I thought maybe FTP, like their Hyperdeck products support, would be an alternative to SMB, but nope again.
I got around the anonymous login issue by using a linux box to do copies instead.
It seems the only “ingest” they are interested in is uploading to BM Cloud Store.
l resorted to having my NAS login to the cloud dock to draw the files over from the Cloud Dock.
BTW, the various drives show up under the fixed share names: Media, Media_2, Media_3, Media_4 (I have a Cloud Dock 4). There is no way to change them.