What's in the little red box? Akitio's Node Lite is a versatile expansion chassis that houses desktop-style PCI Express (PCIe) cards, letting you use them with a Thunderbolt 3-equipped laptop.
One of the reasons you might invest in the Node Lite is to drop in a screaming-fast PCIe external storage drive.
With the new Intel Optane SSD version of the Node Lite ($1,499), Akitio is removing the guesswork of which drive to buy and shooting directly at the moon, bundling one of the fastest consumer solid-state drives (SSDs) on the market.
This wildly expensive combo comprises the drive enclosure and an Intel Optane SSD 905P, which alone retails for $1,200.
Whether this potent, pricey pair is right for you depends on what your PC setup is, and how frequently you perform tasks that suffer from slow storage.
(Spoiler: For most folks, it's a dozen kinds of overkill.)
Pared Down, But Plenty Pretty
The Node Lite, as its name suggests, is a reduced version of the Akitio Node, a huge (almost 17-inch-long) metal box that connects to your PC or Mac via Thunderbolt 3 and lets you add one of a wide variety of PCIe cards: a graphics card, a video-capture card, a card-style SSD.
The Node Lite is much smaller than the full Node, measuring 5.9 by 3 by 9.2 inches (HWD), which means it only accommodates half-length PCIe cards.
It also has a less powerful cooling fan and a smaller power supply, which effectively rules out using it as an external GPU enclosure like the Razer Core or the Alienware Graphics Amplifier.
Instead, most buyers of the Node Lite will use it to attach a speedy PCIe drive that wouldn't fit in a laptop or a tiny desktop.
While you can simply buy a Node Lite and a separate PCIe card (here's a list of all the compatible cards), Akitio decided to make it easy for people who just need external storage by selling a version of the Node Lite with the 960GB version of the Optane SSD 905P already installed.
Aside from the fact that it includes the Optane drive, the differences between this version of the Node Lite and the vanilla Node mostly amount to more bling.
Instead of plain-looking, sober aluminum, the chassis is fire-engine red, and the Lite adds a transparent acrylic panel to let you see the card you've installed inside (and spent so much cash on).
When you gaze through the acrylic, your eyes can feast upon the Optane SSD 905P, complete with color LED highlights that you can configure using Intel's Windows-only Solid State Drive Toolbox app.
At the front, a perforated area allows air to flow into a small cooling fan.
It's plenty strong enough to cool the Optane SSD 905P and pretty much any other type of storage device you'd want to install, as well as many video-capture cards, though it's not powerful enough to cool a high-end GPU.
Mounted in the middle of the front face is a backlit Akitio logo, which glows blue when the drive is connected to a PC or a Mac.
There's no power button—the Node Lite roars to life automatically when you connect its power adapter to an outlet and its included Thunderbolt 3 cable to a computer.
(It doesn't actually roar—I couldn't hear the fan in a noisy office—but it is rated for a not-quite-silent 23 decibels.
So you might not want to install it, say, in a recording studio.)
All of the ports are located on the Node Lite's back side.
The power port is on the bottom, below a DisplayPort output and two Thunderbolt 3 ports.
You'll use one of the Thunderbolt 3 ports to connect to your computer, leaving the other one free to connect to another peripheral such as a dock, another drive, or an external display.
Up to six Thunderbolt 3 devices can be daisy-chained together.
The back edge also includes two thumbscrews for removing the PCIe card carrier from the outer chassis.
This insert is essentially a sled that slides into the chassis from the front.
If you need to remove the Optane SSD 905P for any reason—perhaps to swap it out for another card—you loosen the two thumbscrews, slide out the sled, and loosen another thumbscrew to remove the card from the sled.
It's a painless, tool-less process.
There are a few downsides to the Node Lite's port selection.
The first is power.
The device has its own power supply and passes a 12-volt direct current to each of the Thunderbolt 3 ports, but that's not enough to power many laptops.
I tested the Node Lite with an HP Spectre Folio ($1,299.99 at HP) , which refused to charge from the Node Lite connection, and a 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro ($1,449.00 at Amazon) , which charged much slower than it would have using its own 65-watt power adapter.
The second downside is that the Node Lite is missing the HDMI and USB Type-A ports that are common on many Thunderbolt 3 external devices, which turns them into de facto docks right out of the box.
You can still connect an HDMI display or a USB Type-A peripheral, but you'll need an adapter.
This requirement cancels a lot of value from the Node Lite, but it is unfortunately par for the course for Akitio's similar devices; the company's other external enclosures typically don't come with a generous port selection, either.
You don't have to shop too hard to find inexpensive Thunderbolt 3 and USB Type-C docks and adapters, however.
So if you're buying the Node Lite primarily for its storage prowess, the lack of ports may not matter.
A Rocket, But Just Shy of Native Speeds
The Thunderbolt 3 interface provides for a maximum throughput of 40GBps.
In theory, that should allow the Optane SSD 905P to operate just as well as if it were seated in the motherboard of a desktop PC.
In practice, however, many more variables involved could affect the drive's performance, everything from the number of additional connected Thunderbolt 3 peripherals to the firmware that's installed on your computer.
I decided to eliminate as many of these factors as possible by connecting the Node Lite to the Spectre Folio with the latest Thunderbolt 3 drivers downloaded from Intel's website.
(Akitio offers no software or firmware of its own, and Mac users can ensure that they have the latest Thunderbolt drivers by updating to macOS 10.13.4 or later.) I connected a DisplayPort monitor and a USB Type-C portable SSD to the Node Lite to verify that they worked properly (they did), but I disconnected them before I tested the Node Lite's transfer speeds.
On the whole, those speeds ended up being very close to the scores the Optane SSD 905P achieved when I tested it as an internal drive, though just a tiny touch behind.
The Node Lite achieved a sequential read speed of 2,642MBps, versus the Optane SSD 905P's 2,706MBps when tested as a stand-alone card in our Intel X299-based storage testbed.
Sequential writes were similar, if a bit more pronounced: 2,197MBps versus 2,384MBps.
On the other hand, the difference in PCMark 8 Storage test scores was essentially nil: 5,109 for the Node Lite, versus 5,135 for the Optane SSD 905P as an internal drive.
Random read and writes were the main point of difference.
The Optane SSD 905P, when installed directly in our desktop motherboard, was a rocket on these tests, but in the Akitio chassis over the Thunderbolt 3 connection, it didn't register nearly as high.
The Node Lite version's random throughput scores were much lower: 83MBps reads against 295MBps reads for the internal drive, and 50MBps writes versus 267MBps writes.
Essentially, these results show that depending on the PC or Mac you use, the Node Lite equipped with the Optane SSD 905P can offer very similar performance to a desktop with the same drive installed in a PCIe expansion slot.
But for certain types of operations, using the drive in the chassis may put a modest damper on things.
For more on how the 905P performs compared with other internal SSDs, check out my full Optane SSD 905P review.
Justifying the Node: A Series of "If's"
No getting around the fact: The very fastest solid state storage is expensive.
If you need this absolutely topping level of storage speed on a laptop or a small desktop PC that doesn't have a PCIe slot (an M.2 slot, or a full-size slot), and you already have a dock for your non-USB-C peripherals, and money is no object, you could convince yourself that the Node Lite is worth the expense.
That's a lot of "if's," however.
And the first one is especially important.
Nearly everyone who doesn't edit 4K video would be better served by a regular external SSD like the Editors' Choice Samsung Portable SSD T5.
It's not nearly as fast as the Node Lite in benchmark testing and in edge cases, but it's still plenty fast enough for most consumers under most circumstances.
(Plus, Samsung offers a Thunderbolt 3-specific version of the drive, the Samsung Portable SSD X5, that comes in at about half the price for 1TB of storage versus this Node Lite/Optane combo.) And many 4K video editors likely have desktops in their studios that have a spare PCIe slot into which they can slide an Optane SSD 905P without the need for an external enclosure.
So: The Node Lite is unquestionably a unique combo-bundle product for a limited subset of circumstances.
It fills its niche well, but be very sure that you indeed fall into that niche—and you can't escape it by using a desktop PC or settling for a slower external drive.
