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Still no Thunderbolt Splitter?
- Thread starter EricBrian
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Still semi-vaporware, but the much-delayed Belkin Express Dock will give you two Thunderbolt ports:
http://www.belkin.com/us/thunderbolt
http://www.belkin.com/us/thunderbolt
Not quite. You have to connect one to your Mac. The second is for daisy-chaining/pass-through.
Hence the advantage of buying devices with dual ports for daisy chaining.
Of the two "chains" on my iMac:
1) iMac port 1 -> Pegasus R4 -> Seagate Desktop Drive -> A pair of Seagate portable TB drives for manual rotation of offsite backup of media.
2) iMac port 2 -> TBD -> unpopulated port
The only thing I am waiting for now is a 20 meter optical TB cable... so that I can move the Pegasus & Seagate desktop drives up into my secure storage closet one floor up.
/Jim
Of the two "chains" on my iMac:
1) iMac port 1 -> Pegasus R4 -> Seagate Desktop Drive -> A pair of Seagate portable TB drives for manual rotation of offsite backup of media.
2) iMac port 2 -> TBD -> unpopulated port
The only thing I am waiting for now is a 20 meter optical TB cable... so that I can move the Pegasus & Seagate desktop drives up into my secure storage closet one floor up.
/Jim
I must not understand what vaporware is because I don't know why people say this about Thunderbolt. There are numerous drives available at +/- $200. LaCie, Promise, Seagate, Buffalo all have several thunderbolt products out. One cable plugs all of my drives into my MBPr and they are fast and reliable thus far. I was an early adopter and it's been a great standard for me.
"Vaporware" as in Belkin announced that product over a year ago and has yet to ship it. BTW I was mistaken about the two TB outputs, one is in and one is out as someone pointed out above. I thought there was a separate "In" port.
Individual companies may announce products on many different technologies... but their individual failure to deliver does not mean the entire category is "vaporware".
TB is alive and healthy... and those of us who are using it are reaping the benefits. It is MUCH faster than any other interface on today's Macs, which becomes obvious as soon as one starts using it. Not only is it a fast bus... but the CPU utilization is superb. The price premium is very small compared to the performance that it delivers. Just a few years ago, this type of performance was only available using very expensive enterprise solutions.
/Jim
Sorry... I misinterpreted the comments. There are a number of people who wildly complain about TB without realizing just how much value it offers. Those of use who are using it to its potential, generally know better.
/Jim
$300?!?!
That's definitely going to be extremely popular. The price is very affordable and very similar to USB 3.0 hubs.
Another nail in the Thunderbolt coffin.
And most probably the final one in the Firewire coffin.
This does NOT provide a Thunderbolt "hub" capability. There are two TB connections... one to connect to your Mac... and a second to daisy chain to the next TB peripheral in the chain.
I'll argue that TB is not dead. Most who use it routinely probably realizes it. Anyone who previously used enterprise class peripherals realizes that TB is an absolute bargain.
/Jim
It looks like one TB cable goes into the "front" and there are two TB ports coming out the back. So you get two TB ports with the use of one from the Mac.
The device looks rather good if you don't mind all those cables. Some of my TB hard drive do not daisy chain, like my LaCie d2 USB 3.0 Thunderbolt Series 4TB and 3 TB External Hard Drives. Some of the LaCie Drives do daisy chain Thunderbolt.
nope. if you look at the back of the device one of the thunderbolt cords that is plugged into the back is bent around going back underneath and back out the front.
Thanks, I did notice that and wondered about it. Unfortunate one cannot split Thunderbolt.. Still the hub idea is a good one.
It's as dead as firewire was 5 years ago. There are a few users, who use the terms "enterprise", "bandwidth" and such. And there is the rest, who uses USB. It was the exactly same story with USB, if you recall.
And now? USB 3.0 retains compatibility with all the old revisions.
And firewire? Dead.
Oh, I use the TB display. It's a great piece of hardware and I wish TB would take of as USB did. Sadly I am sure, that is not going to happen.
I am more familiar with USB than you can probably imagine.
USB's extreme focus on cost (with the goal of PC ubiquity) was what propelled its acceptance. A few "ease of use" features such as breaking the 1/1 correspondence between "ports" and "peripherals" helped... as well as providing significant power distribution. Still... the cost structure is what drove it to ubiquity.As you stated... FW moved forward and became very relavent in a few smaller markets... such as digital video (largely because of Sony) and professional applications.
In many ways (as you stated)... TB fills that same need as FW once did. I believe that the demise of FW today is a result of those professional applications moving to TB.
Hence... USB is being replaced by new versions of USB. FW is being replaced by TB.
Personally... I would not expect TB to replace USB. It is possible, but unlikely, that USB could replace TB. In fact... it does in many consumer PCs today... the same class of machines that never had FW in the first place. However, TB advances the professional capability of professional machines (over FW)... just like USB 3.0 extends the capabilities over the original USB 1.1.
So... that was a long-winded way of agreeing with you.
/Jim
Honestly I never looked at TB and USB as "NOT" being in competition.
If you take that out of the equation, it starts to make more sense. But I still struggle with the thought that TB is going to have a hard time achieving the critical mass of users with these prices.
And there's another perspective:
- low bandwidth/range - BT
- high bandwidth/range - A/C
- very high bandwidth/wired - TB
- charging - induction
With consumer devices moving to inductive charging and wireless transmission speeds reaching the speeds of wired ethernet and exceeding the writing capablities of NAND chips (not in RAID, that is) - there is really no need for USB anymore. Or for any wired protocol, except for those, requering extreme transfer rates.
What is the main usage of USB nowadays? (if you think of connect/disconnect events) Charging...
Thanks for pointing me in a bit different direction of thinking.
If you take that out of the equation, it starts to make more sense. But I still struggle with the thought that TB is going to have a hard time achieving the critical mass of users with these prices.
And there's another perspective:
- low bandwidth/range - BT
- high bandwidth/range - A/C
- very high bandwidth/wired - TB
- charging - induction
With consumer devices moving to inductive charging and wireless transmission speeds reaching the speeds of wired ethernet and exceeding the writing capablities of NAND chips (not in RAID, that is) - there is really no need for USB anymore. Or for any wired protocol, except for those, requering extreme transfer rates.
What is the main usage of USB nowadays? (if you think of connect/disconnect events) Charging...
Thanks for pointing me in a bit different direction of thinking.
Regarding the two bolded sections above.
1) While A/C might encroach on wired ethernet in consumer implementations... it will not do the same to TB... nor will it displace ethernet in enterprise. TB is really a pro-level technology. The fact that we can get the capability so damn inexpensively in our Macs is fantastic. Don't compare it to USB. Compare it to enterprise solutions at "near consumer" price points.
2 ) NAND is going to be augmented within the next few years (probably 4-5) with new replacement technology that is yet 3 additional orders of magnitude faster than NAND. So while NAND is 3 orders of magnitude (1000X) faster than HDDs... it is still 3 orders of magnitude (1000X) slower than system memory. This is evident if you compare IOPs of SSDs to IOPs of HDDs. IOPs are what makes your computer fly.
The replacement technology for NAND will be approximately the same speed as system memory... and will also have much better endurance and much smaller block size (certainly down to cache line sizes and potentially down to byte level). As a result what we know as storage and memory will blur. This is perhaps the single largest change that is looming in the field of computer science. It is absolutely fascinating.
/Jim