Can you give some examples of these products of "other protocols" that have s.m.a.r.t?
Read back because I answered that question before you even asked it
If storage has sata inside and usb/tb outside, you can't name it as an example of something that's faster or better than sata.
And I didn't
What I meant by that is that USB/TB are more versatile because they allow you to connect storage as well as many other items. SATA does not, it only allows storage and requires you to power the device separately (USB/TB can bus power it). If you have a small thin notebook like an ultrabook it makes more sense to use the connection that is the most versatile. That would be USB/TB in this case and not SATA or eSATA.
If storage has sata inside, esata shouldn't slow it down. Problem here is that currently it can slow it down, because esata haven't been upgraded when internal sata has got more speed. I'm not sure why this is so.
eSATA is basically routing the internal SATA connector to the outside of the machine. There are these PCIe slot covers with such connectors you can buy for your machine (it's how some fitted their Mac Pro with eSATA). They probably use the SATA2 ports (many mainboards have both SATA2 and SATA3 ports).
I don't see how bying triple price tb boxes can save me money in the future.
Because now you can invest in different devices and upgrade them separately. You can buy the item that best fits your needs. If you want portability but still want the benefits from an ergonomic workplace you get with a desktop then it is now possible.
Think of that famous cartoon with the iMac vs a Dell computer. What if the webcam breaks? With the Dell you can still work because only the webcam needs to be sent in for RMA. With the iMac you can't do anything because the entire machine has to be sent in.
The cost savings come from paying what you need and/or from only having to return the defective item (it saves you from complete loss of production).
Well, you could just had a usb hub or usb card to mp's pcie slot. Cheap and flexible solution.
I did end up buying a USB2 PCIe card (USB3 version didn't exist at the time or simply didn't work; TB/Lightpeak didn't exist either) which was an additional cost with some benefits (for one the Mac didn't wake from sleep when I plugged or unplugged a cable). The USB2 one is very cheap, an ok working USB3 version isn't (there are no USB3 cards that work properly in a Mac Pro as you can read on various forums).
Having PCIe is nice but in reality it is quite useless in the Mac Pro. Yes you can insert cards but they also need to work properly in OS X and that is the biggest problem. Most do not work correctly, there are always some kind of problems. This has to do with driver support from the manufacturers and it seems to be a lot better with TB equipment (one of the benefits from Intel and Apple joining forces).
Thunderbolt isn't getting any more cost effective by not having unused fw ports on your computer.
I wasn't talking about the cost of TB, I was talking about the cost of my computer. With TB you get to pick what protocols, connectors, etc. you use. Those ports actually get used. You don't have that with the firewire ports, they will stay unused.
It seems that this ideology of one-port-for-everything will make macs very expensive to use. You need dongles and converters for everything and need to worry about daisy-chains. Everything costs twice or triple times what they used to be.
You are making the very common mistake of looking at current pricing. You need to look down the road. As we've seen with the adapters for gigabit ethernet and fw800 TB adapters certainly do not cost twice or triple times as much, they cost the same (the Broadcom NIC in the TB-GbE adapter is the same used on many other PCIe NICs that cost similarly). Something similar applies to the docks but to a lesser extent. Most docks seem to be around 100~150 Euro whereas Thunderbolt docks are around 150~200 Euro at the moment (prices may change in a few years as they did with ssd's and other tech; do keep in mind that Thunderbolt docks can be used with any device that has a Thunderbolt connection, old school docks are limited to certain models!).
If you look at the roadmap Intel put out for Thunderbolt you can see where they are going. They are working on getting the costs down and speeds up (100Gbit over 10+ meters by using fibre optics).
You do need to worry about daisy chaining...a bit. With the Mac Pro there is little to worry about, with a notebook there is a bit more but you either only use 1 or 2 on the road or a dock at home (1 connector to connect everything). If you only have 1 port like the MBA and you need to connect monitor and ethernet card you need something like a TB switch or dock.
Need more usb ports to pc? Get $20 usb card. Need more usb ports to mac? Get tb-box for $200.
You mean "use a USB hub".
Bonding display signal to same pipe with everything else will cost hiccups more easily than before, if there's really power hungry displays. And the display protocol will be one gen behind because of additional bonding protocol.
You can run displays via USB3 just fine. USB3 has a theoretical max speed of 5Gbps and a lot of overhead. Thunderbolt is 10Gbit per channel (it uses more than 1) and has far less overhead. Or simply: there is no problem with bandwidth.
RADAR? You mean audio recording? How that could take 10Gbytes/s? A thousand tracks?
Because it is realtime data. You are not recording audio (although RADAR is audio: it is high frequency sound) but collecting data. The amount of data you receive is enormous which is why it can take 10 Gbps.
Yep, ssd's are fast, but very few people editing video can spend tens of TBs of ssd in every project, so we need to have lots of hdd's.
Yep and for that the Mac Pro with its mere 4 3.5" disk bays is not enough -> external storage. If you take a look at what storage costs you'll see that Thunderbolt is one of the cheapest options. It is direct attached storage with a bandwidth of up to 10Gbps. If you look at alternative technologies such as 10Gbit ethernet the costs will rice quite steeply. Thunderbolt is actually a poor mans 10Gbit option (50 Euro for a 2 meter cable is better than 200+ Euro for the same length).
S.m.a.r.t is just one thing about reliability.
Then you definitely need to look it up at Wikipedia. SMART has little to do with reliability. It is just a means of reading out some stats of the drive. It is the operating system/BIOS/EFI who will then alert the user (or not). That's why it is called "Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology". Reliability means a well built disk and a setup that is able to handle a failed disk (either hardware failure or software failure).
But when some storage fails, it will mean a big hassle wich will eat a lot of time. Finding faulty thing, replacing it, restore data from backups and doing the work again what you did after last backup.
If you need to do things like that with even a minor failure then you clearly did it wrong. Good and reliable storage will handle failures (up to a certain point I must add). Also it will tell you what is faulty, which drive is faulty, etc. so you can quickly and easily fix it. Restore from backup is only something you do when the previous things did not work at all.
Much easier just monitor smart status and act half a year or just one day before you lose something.
No. Much easier to know the limits of your knowledge and let somebody who actually does know his stuff handle it. In this case you'd call in a storage expert who can set up a proper storage environment where you don't have to monitor yourself. You can not act before you lose something because there is no knowing of that. SMART is not a fortune teller! It tells you when the drive has failed and thus there will be loss of data (you are lucky if you still have all your data..intact). If you want to prevent data loss make sure to use backups and something like RAID (RAID is NOT a backup!).
Well, I would "get an eSATA-Thunderbolt connector", if there would be a decent one. All we have now is just that bulky box from lacie; $200 for 2 ports and not even port multiplier avare. Can't get more lame than that. Also, I'm still waiting for that tb-usb-box for less than $200. Should be way less than even $100.
It took USB3 quite a lot of time to get going with proper driver support and all. It's only since 2012 they managed to do that. Thunderbolt seems to be moving at a faster pace (luckily) but I hope that pace will be going faster next year.
What tb does for workstation user is that every part of your workstation, that used to be cheap and neatly inside your workstation, now need external box, power supply and even expensive cable with amazing prices, that most of the industry just won't accept to pay.
No it doesn't. As I have explained the expandability of the current Mac Pro is a myth due to lacking OS X support by manufacturers. Also, the internals only allow for 4 disks. Many people need more and/or they need something to share with others (as in nearly every company). In other words: most people are already using some kind of external storage. We can clearly see this with the NAS/SAN segment: many options available now.
All the other parts still remain inside (cpu, gpu, OS disk, mem, powersupply, cooling system, etc.).
Tb is nice for making laptop a mobile workstation-on-the-road, but who needs tiny workstation enclosures or razor thin displays? Those are just gimmicks with no actual benefit for the working people.
Anybody who is moving around with a computer and is human. The biggest complaint people have about notebooks: "it's so heavy, why?". Carrying around heavy equipment is not good for shoulders, etc.
Btw, I have always wondered why some mac users whine about ports they don't use or need. Do those ports somehow hinder the computer when not in used.
You can't make everybody happy. Whatever someone sees as an advantage can be a disadvantage to somebody else. Using something like Thunderbolt seems to be the best compromise since people can decide what they connect to it (downside: you need to buy adapters).
I know the flexibility that Thunderbolt brings is quite difficult to grasp for a lot of people. You need to be able to look down the road which most people can't. This flexibility of Thunderbolt also requires a different way of computing. It is much broader than notebooks and desktops. It is paving the way for more unified devices that you can use to do different tasks ranging from simple to complex. It is a complete different way of how we currently do computing. Cloud computing is also part of it as well as things like VDI (Citrix XenApp, VMware View) and the entire BYOD concept. Ubuntu has jumped on this bandwagon too with the Ubuntu Edge. That clearly showed the not so far future of computing.
