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Belkin Shows Off Upcoming Thunderbolt Express Dock
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Audio is the sore thumb sticking out in the middle of the left side of a Macbook Air. No elegant solution to it aside from adding some sort of USB soundcard/Griffin iMic type of deal...
Only if there's decent speaker system that takes USB as the audio source...
so nice to have this thunderbolt on my air and have absolutly no accessories other than expensive RAID units and a display I don't need!
Im not overly concerned about usb3 yet. A lot of us Mac users do have investments in FW800 gear though, so that is still important to me right now. It is frustrating that Apple isn't doing usb3 yet, but neither is intel which is hugely lame. Basically requires 'other' third party chipsets and drivers as a result. Personally my preference still leans toward FW800, or TBolt when pricing is cheaper, for the ability to daisy chain devices.
If it had 1/8" audio out I'd buy it in a second.
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I use this with this. Add an USB extension cable to hide the whole ugly thing under your desk and what you end up with is 1 usb cable and magsafe adapter plugged in to get all your connectivity. Unfortunately this solution makes the volume keys on the MBA not work, unless you use soundflower, but that's a pain. I really wish the kensington ethernet adapter/usb hub had audio built in though, with proper drivers so the volume keys worked.
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I use this with this. Add an USB extension cable to hide the whole ugly thing under your desk and what you end up with is 1 usb cable and magsafe adapter plugged in to get all your connectivity. Unfortunately this solution makes the volume keys on the MBA not work, unless you use soundflower, but that's a pain. I really wish the kensington ethernet adapter/usb hub had audio built in though, with proper drivers so the volume keys worked.
I think people might be rating it down because there's no way to really tell from the pictures how big it might be. I have a feeling it might be a lot smaller than the pictures make it look. But the taco design is a bit funky.
lets be honest eSata is a pain in the ass having to power down to connect and then power up again and now with faster things like TB it's becoming obsolete and can die in peace, and USB 3 is only here to be a pain in the ass of people who want a decent IO I wish USB had never been used for data transfer, we could all have FW-thumb drives instead of USB ones and the world would be a better place, but unfortunately now USB 3 is here and every tom, rick & harry HAS to have it, I say kill it off now and just replace everything with thunderbolt, and come up with something low bandwidth and and cheap for cheap keyboards and mice, or use TB for that too (I know of some high end gaming gear that could benefit from something better than USB)
wow that turned into a bit of a rant
wow that turned into a bit of a rant
This would be great to have if I still had a notebook; I had something plugged into every single port on my MBP, and unplugging everything was such a friggen hassle.
USB3 doesn't *have* to be in its Pantone Blue shade, it's merely an option.
Apple has a patent on MagSafe, which is the reason for its non-presence.
USB3 doesn't *have* to be in its Pantone Blue shade, it's merely an option.
Apple has a patent on MagSafe, which is the reason for its non-presence.
I can walk into any number of local stores and pick up a USB 3 drive for not much more than a USB 2 variant that works with all my current hardware, including my Mac. I have no idea where to go pick up any sort of ThunderBlunder drive and certainly not for anything approaching USB prices. Beyond those little $50 cables to nowhere I don't see much of anything to walk up and purchase. Typical Apple go-it-alone attitude I guess.
Or, you know, some actual products to connect with it. The fact that a surprisingly basic and ugly hub is getting this much attention shows what a small world the FireBolt realm really is.
Exactly, I can't wait for an eSATA adapter. I'd love to have an external SSD on my iMac without ripping the thing open & voiding my AppleCare.
Can you post a mock-up of your own design? Curious to see how much better it is!
FireWire drives are extremely easy to find.
Belkin may not want to pay the additional fee to license USB 3 but they should.
Other companies will be making similar devices.
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So you have no Thunderbolt, USB, Fw800, or display devices that need to connect to anything? Heh.
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They have mini display port which leaves more room for other ports.
Belkin may not want to pay the additional fee to license USB 3 but they should.
Other companies will be making similar devices.
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So you have no Thunderbolt, USB, Fw800, or display devices that need to connect to anything? Heh.
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They have mini display port which leaves more room for other ports.
Awesome. I'll be selling my TB display for a nice 30" monitor without built-in mirror as soon as Belkin starts selling this thing.
I think they should've made is more box shaped, keep the ports they have on the back (with the addition of analog/digital audio) but also add USB, Firewire and Thunderbolt ports on the front.
eSata I could go either way, I hardly ever use the eSata port on my desktop.
eSata I could go either way, I hardly ever use the eSata port on my desktop.
Ever heard of eSATAp?
Sata is the native connection in every hdd/ssd. You can't get faster than the native connection.
Reason why hdd manufacturers are trying to hide sata inside is for you to not get worried about s.m.a.r.t. condition before hdd is out of warranty.
And the difference between TB enclosure and eSATAp enclosure is the additional number in price tag of the former.
yes I know HDD's use SATA internally but with the architecture of SATA that's where it should stay, the fastest SATA connection to date is 6Gb/s (and I'm pretty sure eSATA is still only 3Gb/s) TB is 10Gb/s so a TB HDD is just as fast and an eSATA/ SATA one just more convenient, and then if you have an external RAID enclosure eSATA is no longer fast enough to give you the speed advantages of RAID making a TB RAID enclosure faster than an eSATA one
and no I have not heard of eSATAp
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you obviously have no idea how crap USB is even compared to FW400 if you did you would be hoping USB would die a swift death, but I have peachiness and will wait for a nice TB HDD to have a nice fast backup and storage drive, a USB backup drive is just painfull
I'm pretty sure the side with the ports is intended as the back, not the front.
Do you have any links with information concerning this? I've never been much of a hardware guy and it does interest me a lot at the moment
I believe that you are confused. Technically speaking it makes absolutely zero sense to dump a faster port standard like SATA (6 Gbps) with low protocol overhead, low latency, and lower licensing costs to go with USB 3 (max 5 GBps on a good day) along with its higher protocol overhead and resulting latency.
What is probably likely to happen is that the integrated SATA->USB3 electronics will be built on some drive models allowing them to serve dual purposes, but trust me, SATA is here for a long, long time.