Blackmagic Cloud Dock 2 Setup Not Great
As great as the hardware is, the software is where this runs into some big challenges. Here is the dashboard that you get from the HDMI output. You can see the issue with the first disk, we will get to that next.
Here is a shot at what happens when we installed a SK hynix 1TB SATA SSD. As a quick note, the SATA drives cannot come close to saturating a 10GbE link, but we tested if the 10Gbase-T ports would negotiate down to 2.5GbE speeds and they did.
Once you get the unit up and running, it will acquire an IP address via DHCP (if available) and show up on your network.
A big challenge is that, since there is just about zero security on this device, the “guest” username and no password does not work in Windows 11 out of the box.
Instead, you have to go to the Group Policy Editor -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> All Settings and you can just start typing in “Enable insecure guest logons” and it will bring you to the setting you need. This, of course, assumes you have a local policy, not one set by a network administrator on the system.
Once there, you can open the menu and click Enabled which allows for connecting to guest logons for SMB shares.
Once you do that, you can then access the Cloud Dock 2.
Here is an example with a 1TB SATA SSD and a 3.84TB NVMe SSD installed in the Cloud Dock 2 where each presents its own network share. If you were hoping for RAID 1, this is not the option for you.
You can also connect to the Cloud Dock 2 and change some settings via the USB port.
If you want to manage it via the network, there is another step. First you must connect a system to the USB port and then use the Blackmagic Cloud Store Setup to select management via USB and Ethernet instead of just via USB. Again, there is no management password, and no setting to manage users. In either case, you are running as insecure as can be.
Also, we are not entirely sure if this meets many of the requirements around devices having unique passwords as we covered in Why Your Favorite Default Passwords Are Changing. It seems “guest” with no password and no way to prompt for a password is exactly what legislation mandating more secure passwords is trying to block.
The next option menu is Cloud Sync. Here you can sync storage with Blackmagic Cloud Sync or Dropbox. You can also simply sync proxies. If you are not familiar, proxies are lower bitrate and often lower resolution versions of full video files that can be used for editing. Since many cameras today generate huge video files that are tough to transfer over some WAN uplinks, proxies are a way to accelerate the time from shooting footage to editing.
On the Storage menu you might expect to be able to do things like set RAID levels, or even format disks. Instead, you have two features. You can turn the storage into Read Only mode. You can also open the network share.
The major feature that is missing here is the ability to format disks. We went through about nine different NVMe SSDs that showed the capacity but would not work in the unit. Then we realized we needed to plug the NVMe SSD into the system and format it as exFAT. Once we did this, the NVMe SSDs worked. While we have systems setup to quickly do this on NVMe and SATA SSDs, many do not.
To us, the first two major feature misses are the ability to format drives and the entire user and security setup. We knew this would be barebones, but at the same time, those are must-have features.
Final Words
This is a neat design but it might simply be too simple. Hopefully, some of this can be addressed via firmware in the future, but we are not holding out for that. In many ways, it was like the Cloud Pod, but the drive formatting issue was acute.
The idea is very promising, and it is very simple, but the software side really hurt the overall experience.
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.