I've owned my SB (2011) MBP for over a month now. I have yet to use the Thunderbolt port and wished many times that it had USB3.0 support. Are there any Thunderbolt adapters available on the market yet? TB to USB 3.0 would be great. Alternatively a docking station would be cool. Anything besides the one LaCie drive?
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Any Thunderbolt stuff available yet?
- Thread starter wct097
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I haven't seen any TB devices being widely available, yet. Many OEMs have said Q2 so Computex looks pretty promising.
TB wise I have only seen the same hard drive. I did see the other day on the wall street journal site that a Byte-dock has thunderbolt tech in it. Not sure to what degree this is. It also said on there site that they supply with Thunderbolt to HDMI cable to transmits Audio again I am not that techy so not totally sure if this would be what you are looking for.
Yes, you would think that they would support the port before they released it. I see the advantage and all but at the time of introduction they should have had some peripherals and other crap available instead of making people wait 4 months.
Put a USB 3.0 controller in this revision, announce thunderbolt, then in the next revision (Ivy bridge in December) release it with thunderbolt. People are really only going to be able to use the data transfer abilities of thunderbolt for half of the time between the revisions and unless you are backing up to a SSD you will see not difference in speed between USB 3.0 and thunderbolt.
Penny wise pound foolish.
Even the Lacie drive(s) won't be available until Summer 2011.
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10549
Promise have also announced a range of RAID drives, also expected sometime in the summer.
http://www.promise.com/storage/raid_series.aspx?m=192®ion=en-global&rsn1=40&rsn3=47
There's **** all for thunderbolt at the moment, just got to wait for it to kick off.
Not a very encouraging article about it in Extreme Tech.
"Why Thunderbolt is Dead in the Water"
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2385615,00.asp
The writer makes some pretty strong arguments.
"Why Thunderbolt is Dead in the Water"
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2385615,00.asp
The writer makes some pretty strong arguments.
That article is biased, TB implementation through mDP was not apple's nor intel's decision, it was due to a USB implementers forum statement. That being said, if Sony truly implement TB through an USB port, then mDP implementation of TB do have a grim outlook.
Also, such fast transfer rates are not meant for consumer-level users. There's no reason an average user would need to transfer a 50GB file in less than a minute, hence only professionals will need the technology, therefore cost will not be a major factor.
Nonetheless, I don't think TB is practical as it is now. What if I have my MBP in clamshell mode, connected to an external monitor, and then I need to work with a large video which is in an external SSD with TB interface. Do I need to unplug the external monitor and work with a smaller screen???
Bottom line is, as of now there are more questions than answers and is hard to know the outcome. But one way or the other there is a large mac users population, so even if apple stand alone with TB, there will be more than enough offerings.
Oh dear.
Hopefully Apple are working with (sponsoring?) Western Digital, Buffalo, LaCie etc. to produce some low cost external HDDs as a kick off.
The problem with this "low cost" external HDD is that they will have to be mechanical drives to be low cost and a large enough size for people to buy them (a 60 GB SSD is the same price as a 1.5 TB mechanical drive). However, these drives read and write data at low speeds (less than 200 MB/ sec). They offer no advantage over USB 3.0 for mechanical drives. The majority of consumers will not use Tbolt to its fullest.
You'll be able to daisy chain TB/mDP devices, so you can have both plugged in at once (Engadget demoed this). Of course the bandwidth consumed by the monitor will reduce transfer speeds to the TB HDD, the question is how much by.
lol. as soon as a few Thunderbolt devices come out, all of this conversation will cease. It *is* the future technology. Something with abilities we used to dream about in tech papers.
Those who seek USB3 seek to limit their own future.
Those who seek USB3 seek to limit their own future.
Yes, because it makes perfect sense to have harddrives that support TB before the port itself is made standard. I mean, who doesn't appreciate a harddrive that you can't use because the port doesn't exist? FAIL.
If you look back at the introduction of USB, you'll notice that it took about a full year for the marketplace to have a considerable amount of USB products. Give it time, TB will take off.
Why limit yourself to one or the other?
I'll take both.
I've no objection in principle. It's just that after awhile, you'll have no interest in using USB3. It is, at best, an interim technology. One you want for a few gadgets that are available *today*, but it is a technology that you'll not care about in a years time.
I've got a hunch that USB 3 will be the mainstream choice for a lot longer than a year. It all depends whether Thunderbolt will be competitively priced.
If there's a 50+% price premium then it's going to be another FireWire 800, loved by pros and prosumers and ignored by the average consumer even though it is miles better.
Thunderbolt won't speed up anything if the bottleneck is elsewhere. While it would most likely be faster than USB 2.0, don't expect it to fly because smart phones don't have that great read and write performance (only one NAND and the controller is limited too).
The thing is, USB isn't going anywhere. Intel will include USB 3.0 in Panther Point chipsets but Thunderbolt will still require a discrete controller. That means Intel has no plan of killing USB. Although, why would they? USB is the standard. Almost any device nowadays supports USB but what is the case with TB? No device currently supports it.
Also, today's hard drives are nowhere near as fast as USB 3.0 is. You must run several HDs in RAID 0 before you start hitting its bandwidth limit. An average user cannot utilize the extra speed offered by TB. Sure, it offers some other features too but until there are some actual products that support it, they aren't that essential. One could argue that SSDs are the future and they will provide more than USB 3.0 but until you can grab a 1TB SSD for less than 100$, they aren't going to be very popular as storage solutions.
Exactly. Thunderbolt won't just suddenly replace USB in all products. And I'm not talking about computers, you need other devices to support it too.
Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 can, and will, coexist.
That article pure garbage. hahaha typical anti-apple fodder for their windows fanboys readers.