Belkin Upgrades Thunderbolt Express Dock with USB 3.0 and eSATA, Bumps Price to $399.99

MovieCutter said:

Weird, I just bought a Seagate Thunderbolt dock from the Apple store for $430, and it came with a 3TB HDD, enclosure, and TB cable...

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The goflex seems the best TB option at the moment as you can easily swap the HDD for any other SATA drive. There seem to be plenty of goflex enclosures without drives on eBay (in the UK at least) I've bought a few and fitted my own drives to them.

I'll get one when it hits $99 - cable included.

ghostface147 said:

I'm still waiting for a company to have a thunderbolt portable hard drive. None of those expensive raid arrays, just a simple 1 terabyte drive I can use for time machine.

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THank you God. Someone is smart. I don't need some crazy raid crap, just give me an alternative to my firewire800 externals. I'm never going to spend $400 for an external let alone even more just to have thunderbolt.

This dock is extremely overpriced and don't see it selling many units at all.
Do we have to wait 4 years for the price to come down?

DoFoT9 said:

sure you did. expensive for 3TB. now you go out and buy the $399.99 device just so you can dock it, oh and a TB compatible monitor - look at the price then! given that the internal hard drives are the bottleneck, i'll stick with eSATA or similar, tyvm

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Sure, but all my Macs have TB, so what do I need a $400 dock for to dock it with? Not to mention I moved my other 3TB 7200RPM drives to Seagate enclosures so I can easily hot swap all my drives and they are now ALL Thunderbolt compatible...so I don't see the problem.

If this included some kind of mobile graphics accelerator then I would consider it. But at $399 for just a dock...no thanks.

I'm still hoping for a TB display with a built in graphics card so that my MBA can increase its graphics potential while keeping the same form factor and not increasing heat.

But seriously, this is nearly half the price of the MBA you would be using it with. And it doesn't even include the cable...

Mike Oxard said:

The goflex seems the best TB option at the moment as you can easily swap the HDD for any other SATA drive. There seem to be plenty of goflex enclosures without drives on eBay (in the UK at least) I've bought a few and fitted my own drives to them.

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I bought 5 4TB Seagate GoFlex external drives for less than it would have cost me for the bare drives themselves, 4 came with USB 3 docks, 1 came with FW800 dock. I pulled all the drives to put them into my Drobo, and stuck 3TB high speed drives in the remaining enclosures. So in essence, I now have 5 Thunderbolt hard drives.

The best thing Apple could do is offer TB cables, hubs, and docks at what Jobs would term as "breakthrough" prices. I remember when Apple introduced the PM with DVD-R drive. The kicker was that Apple also started selling DVD-R blanks for $5 each in packs of 5. At the time it was a killer price as everyone else was selling blanks for 3x that price. It's what helped spark DVD-Rs growth (this was a year or so before DVD-R set tops became affordable).

MovieCutter said:

I bought 5 4TB Seagate GoFlex external drives for less than it would have cost me for the bare drives themselves, 4 came with USB 3 docks, 1 came with FW800 dock. I pulled all the drives to put them into my Drobo, and stuck 3TB high speed drives in the remaining enclosures. So in essence, I now have 5 Thunderbolt hard drives.

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I had one Goflex already and I bought 3 empty cases with USB2 docks. I put in SATA drives I already had, including dismantling a WD USB drive. Swapping drives for offsite backup is now very easy.

Simplicated said:

Really, who pays $400 for a hub without a cable included, which brings the total price to at least $450.

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Me. I'll take one, thanks. I already have the cable. This will be brilliant.

ghostface147 said:

I'm still waiting for a company to have a thunderbolt portable hard drive. None of those expensive raid arrays, just a simple 1 terabyte drive I can use for time machine.

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Voila
It's not 1TB but does have thunderbolt.

Mike Oxard said:

The goflex seems the best TB option at the moment as you can easily swap the HDD for any other SATA drive. There seem to be plenty of goflex enclosures without drives on eBay (in the UK at least) I've bought a few and fitted my own drives to them.

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I am waiting for the Caldigit options to become available. I don't even care how much they will cost since faster storage = make money back faster.

http://www.caldigit.com/Thunderbolt/T1T2.html

Why is anything related to Thunderbolt so insanely expensive? Are companies having to fork over 25% of their revenue on Thunderbolt devices to Apple or something? That hub looks to be leaps and bounds better than the similar Matrox hub (assuming it works as advertised.)

But I can't remember the last time I paid more than $50 for a USB 2.0 or ethernet hub. This thing has eSATA (cool), an RJ45 jack, USB 3.0, and Thunderbolt connectivity. I'd pay $125-$150 for it because of the extra ports, but $400 is asinine. Someone at Apple has to be looking at the cost of these Thunderbolt devices and shaking their head. This device, in particular, is lucrative in the consumer market; but the price screams "professional use only."

Ten bucks says this hub will be Alex Lindsay's pick of the week on MacBreak Weekly within the next six months -- and he'll probably buy 5 of them. That same ten bucks says that the majority of listeners to the podcast will shake their heads in disbelief.

$400 = pass

champ01 said:

Voila
It's not 1TB but does have thunderbolt.

Image

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Ridiculously priced and one of the slowest SSDs on the market. No thanks.

firestarter said:

Forget it. As soon as the Mac supports USB3, everyone is going to forget about Thunderbolt as a hard drive standard especially for single disks.

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Well that sucks.

jclardy said:

If this included some kind of mobile graphics accelerator then I would consider it. But at $399 for just a dock...no thanks.

I'm still hoping for a TB display with a built in graphics card so that my MBA can increase its graphics potential while keeping the same form factor and not increasing heat.

But seriously, this is nearly half the price of the MBA you would be using it with. And it doesn't even include the cable...

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Seriously, good call on the need for increasing graphics potential externally through TB built into one of these docks/displays. I doubt apple would ever do that but a third party could absolutely make a doc with some heavy duty GPU in it as well.

Price it at $400, then after a couple months start a 50% off sale and people will jump all over it thinking they're getting a deal at $200

Thunderbolt is starting to look like a "bag of hurt."

paradox00 said:

It is overpriced, but I'm surprised you don't understand the concept of a dock. This would be great for laptop owners who like to use their laptops as desktops at home. Only one cable to connect your monitor, ethernet and all your USB 2/3 and firewire devices to your computer.

It's just a shame that this universal dock costs as much or more than the proprietary docks of the past.

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I Guess I am spoiled.... I have an iMac for my desktop, when I need a laptop I will purchase a laptop for my mobile needs. I even have a beast of a Windows machine just for gaming....

If you are using it as a desktop AND a laptop I can see the merit I guess. I still believe that Apple likes to cull needed ports a bit sooner than their customer base requires.

$400, hahahahaa

This should not cost more than $100. TB is the new FireWire thanks to these idiots.

Another dead in the water tech. Thunderbolt is an epic failure. If the next iMac doesn't come with USB 3.0, I'm keeping my mid-2010 iMac until it does.

I think there's a lot to admire about this product. Pleasing aesthetics, seemingly limitless connectivity possibilities and blazing fast speeds. This is not for home users obviously. But for prosumers looking for a certain kind of style and sophistication, this truly is a great product at a very affordable price.

aurichie said:

I think there's a lot to admire about this product. Pleasing aesthetics, seemingly limitless connectivity possibilities and blazing fast speeds. This is not for home users obviously. But for prosumers looking for a certain kind of style and sophistication, this truly is a great product at a very affordable price.

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Thunderbolt is a bag of hurt.

It's been over year and I STILL can't get a decent hard drive for it.

Wow, I can almost get a basic 16gb ipad for that price!