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bruinsrme

macrumors 604
Original poster
Oct 26, 2008
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Apple has been touting Thunderbolt since the recent refresh of the mbp line.
Now the imac line is equipped with thunderbolt.
Is there anything out there such as portable drives that is taking advantage of this new technology?
 
Apple has been touting Thunderbolt since the recent refresh of the mbp line.
Now the imac line is equipped with thunderbolt.
Is there anything out there such as portable drives that is taking advantage of this new technology?

Lacie is about to release a drive that will be twice as fast as USB 3.0 is capable. As the technology has just been released it will a few more months before we start seeing many of the new products on the market. Thunderbolt is especially useful for video production.
 
Nothing yet. A hub that runs USB 3.0 would be a welcome accessory given that USB 3.0 has been out for a while and a single drive from LaCie isn't exactly something to get excited about.
 
Nothing yet. A hub that runs USB 3.0 would be a welcome accessory given that USB 3.0 has been out for a while and a single drive from LaCie isn't exactly something to get excited about.

yeah a drive that can transfer bi-directionally at 10Gb/s isn't exciting at all... people should want a usb 3.0 drive that is only half that speed..:rolleyes:

10Gb/s means full HD movies will be transferred in seconds as opposed to minutes.

I don't understand why people thought thunderbolt drives and accessories would be available before the port existed on a computer? You really think people would go out and buy external drives that they couldn't plug into anything...? Of course it's going to take a little bit of time for other companies to start implementing thunderbolt into their products, by the end of the year there will be a plethora of external thunderbolt drives.
 
Lacie is about to release a drive that will be twice as fast as USB 3.0 is capable. As the technology has just been released it will a few more months before we start seeing many of the new products on the market. Thunderbolt is especially useful for video production.

which HDD is supposed to support that kind of speed?
 
I have used USB 2.0 for a while now, and I finally broke down and purchased a FW800 drive, and all I can say is wow, why did I wait.

TB however will take some time for MFG's to come up with products, and they will be more expensive as well, so what I like about the new MBP's is they have all 3, can't beat that.
 
You guys do realize that you're not going to plug in a conventional drive that spins at 7200 rpm into a Thunderbolt port and get 10GB/s transfer speeds right?

yeah thunderbolt drives that advertise those speeds use SSD's, typically in a RAID format if they want to use the maximum throughput.
 
It'll take ages for them to come out - Probably once TB is on every Mac you'll start to see widespread TB drives for Mac replacing Firewire and USB drives that used to be sold to Mac customers.
 
It'll take ages for them to come out - Probably once TB is on every Mac you'll start to see widespread TB drives for Mac replacing Firewire and USB drives that used to be sold to Mac customers.

have you not read the thread? There will be thunderbolt drives coming out this summer... not exactly "ages" from now, more like weeks.
 
I just want a TB Hub, with USB, FW, ethernet, and additional TB ports. I hate connecting all those wires to the laptop and then disconnecting 10 min. later if I need to move it.
 
You guys do realize that you're not going to plug in a conventional drive that spins at 7200 rpm into a Thunderbolt port and get 10GB/s transfer speeds right?

Thats exactly what I wanted to get across. The drives advertised are SSDs in RAID. Even a very fast HDD (WD Velociraptor) has substained rates of ~140 MB/S, what good is a TB port that supports 500 MB/s with that kind of drive? Besides, its so loud you think a chopper is starting up on your desk!
So new drive that fully utilize the TB speed are going to be very very costly for a while... :(
 
Thats exactly what I wanted to get across. The drives advertised are SSDs in RAID. Even a very fast HDD (WD Velociraptor) has substained rates of ~140 MB/S, what good is a TB port that supports 500 MB/s with that kind of drive? Besides, its so loud you think a chopper is starting up on your desk!
So new drive that fully utilize the TB speed are going to be very very costly for a while... :(

I just want an enclosure. Right now i'm using the FW800 port which is ok, but hopefully I won't be stuck with this for ever.
 
Thanks for the info.

Sounds like tb will require an "investment" where usb3 will be an affordable solution in the portable arena.

Guess we will see soon enough.
 
Thanks for the info.

Sounds like tb will require an "investment" where usb3 will be an affordable solution in the portable arena.

Guess we will see soon enough.

thunderbolt is no more expensive than usb 3.0 people get the wrong misconceptions when reading information. Yeah you could hook up a normal hard drive in a thunderbolt enclosure and it will work just fine, for the same price as usb 2.0, 3.0, fw, etc.

The cost comes if you want the max speed offered by thunderbolt, or even usb 3.0 for that matter. Hard drives have max read and write speeds, so no matter how fast the port can transfer the data, you are limited by the speed of the drive. If you want faster speeds you need to upgrade to an SSD, or if you want the fastest speeds you will need multiple SSD's in RAID.... regardless of whether or not you are connected to usb 3.0 or thunderbolt or firewire.

usb 3.0 has faster theoretical speeds than max read and write of a conventional hard drive so if you want to take full advantage of those speeds it's going to cost just as much as taking advantage of thunderbolt, thunderbolt just has even more benefits over usb 3.0
 
So there is where I would rather simply have usb3.
I could be benefiting from usb3 speeds today instead of having essentially waiting 6 months for something to come around.
It just seems that the implementation of thunderbolt was a little premature.
Perhaps 2011 mbp users would have benefitted more from USB 3 now and when thunderbolt was a little more, well simply, supported it would have served users more so.
I have several USB portable drives that are noticiabley faster on my pcs.
Just wish They could be utilized on the mbp:(
 
i just want a multiport hub that connects to TB so i can get my usb3 and high speed FW on. along with reading/writing ability for every kind of card based memory in existence as well.
 
i just want a multiport hub that connects to TB so i can get my usb3 and high speed FW on. along with reading/writing ability for every kind of card based memory in existence as well.

I'ld buy one or two
 
With iMac's now sporting 2 tb ports, Belieber me, we will see a plethora of peripherals starting this summer!
 
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bruinsrme said:
So there is where I would rather simply have usb3.
I could be benefiting from usb3 speeds today instead of having essentially waiting 6 months for something to come around.
It just seems that the implementation of thunderbolt was a little premature.
Perhaps 2011 mbp users would have benefitted more from USB 3 now and when thunderbolt was a little more, well simply, supported it would have served users more so.
I have several USB portable drives that are noticiabley faster on my pcs.
Just wish They could be utilized on the mbp:(

So you would have bought a thunderbolt drive 6 months ago when there were no computers on the market that you could plug it in to?

Why would accessories be released before the port exists on peoples computers?

Thunderbolt, previously light peak is brand new tech, nobody but intel and apple were working on it so of course apple is going to be the first to add the port to the computer and accessories will follow.

How could drive makers implement thunderbolt when they didn't even know what kind of connector it would use? People weren't even really expecting light peak to start hitting devices until late this year or early next year.

Also sandy bridge doesn't have the chipset support for USB 3.0 so thats a useless argument.
 
They could at least have made some combo USB/eSATA port. There is nothing faster than eSATA. It wouldn't even need any additional controller or chip on the logic board. Only some wiring.

For USB 3.0 they would have had to put a controller chip on the logic board much like with TB. Thus it at least understandable why there isn't both.

With ivy bridge USB 3.0 will be in the chipset so it will be in the next MBP.
 
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