CES 2012: Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock to Launch in September at $299

[ghettochris]

Why are people so still concerned about USB's CPU load? Also, SATA comes in 6 Gbps flavor now.

I haven't used usb 3 with hard drives so it might have gotten better, but any cpu processing of data is unnecessary and would slow down rendering etc, and it was significant on usb 2, and it actually made my drives sound like crap while reading and writing compared to the smooth sounds of reading/writing over firewire or esata. can't be good for the drives.

True, forgot about the sata moving up to 6 gb/s, esata probably has too but still not good enough for raid.

usb 3 may be good performance for a good price, but it's still not the way if your time is priceless. I doubt any pro video editors/photographers or anyone else who deals with lots of data think usb 3 or esata is > thunderbolt, so it's just that it costs which may not be worth it for some, but priceless to others, and is clearly the "best" right now not factoring in $$

 

[AidenShaw]

Not to mention any of hundreds of video camera models with mini DV, DVCAM, or HDV recording mediums. Or any performance oriented hard drive.

"Performance-oriented" hard drives switched to USB 3.0 about a year or more ago - 1394 is dead.

Imagine coming home with your Macbook Air, Macbook Pro, or other laptop with a thunderbolt port, and not having to plug in...

You mean, finally Apple book owners will be able to do what other laptops have been doing for the last 12 years or more?

And I wonder how long it will take before the Apple OSX software "properly" supports docking?

By "properly", I mean recognizing the individual docks and applying separate hardware profiles for each. My Dell knows when it's at home (network, mouse and a USB drive connected to the home dock) and at work (net, keyboard, mouse, USB multi-card reader, and a second 1600x1200 monitor in portrait mode for the work dock). And, when I push the "dock eject" button at home, the USB drive is properly dismounted, and when I leave work any flash cards are dismounted.

When I'm at home, all the open windows migrate to the built-in screen. Next day, when I'm at work, the ones that started on the 1600x1200 move back to it in the positions and sizes that they had when I left the previous day.

Properly.

 

[Eidorian]

I haven't used usb 3 with hard drives so it might have gotten better, but any cpu processing of data is unnecessary and would slow down rendering etc, and it was significant on usb 2, and it actually made my drives sound like crap while reading and writing compared to the smooth sounds of reading/writing over firewire or esata. can't be good for the drives.

It is really hard to find any recent USB 3.0 reviews that even make mention of CPU utilization overhead. In the few that exist you are looking at 1-2% before a margin of error. The biggest concern appears to be the transfer speeds of the various controllers.

True, forgot about the sata moving up to 6 gb/s, esata probably has too but still not good enough for raid.

SATA, not good enough? Your concerns are so far beyond those of mere computing mortals.

 

[charlieroberts]

thunderbolt is slipping away into the light

 

[Nostromo]

Expensive desktop clutter utility. I wonder how that high $299 price tag came together. Rolling dice? Or is there a cool tax tacked on?

I'd rather have a Mac Pro: all in one box.

 

[AidenShaw]

True, forgot about the sata moving up to 6 gb/s, esata probably has too but still not good enough for raid.

usb 3 may be good performance for a good price, but it's still not the way if your time is priceless. I doubt any pro video editors/photographers or anyone else who deals with lots of data think usb 3 or esata is > thunderbolt, so it's just that it costs which may not be worth it for some, but priceless to others, and is clearly the "best" right now not factoring in $$

Even though USB and eSATA are many times faster than 1394, they're not good enough for pro users?

How did anyone get anything done before T-Bolt arrived? (Oh, wait. We're still waiting for it to "arrive" outside of a few outrageously priced items.)

 

[rkahl]

Even if they offered their 50% off sale, I still wouldn't buy it. This thing could be straight to Marshall's Electronics Dept.

 

[lhotka]

I LIKE IT!

Yes, it's outrageously over-priced, it doesn't come with USB 3.0, it won't even be available for another 9 months, and I know I simply will not purchase one.

BUT look at what it does...

Imagine coming home with your Macbook Air, Macbook Pro, or other laptop with a thunderbolt port, and not having to plug in...

-an ethernet cord for internet
-a USB dongle for your wireless mouse
-a USB dongle for your iPod
-a USB cord for your printer
-a firewire 800 cord for an external hard drive
-a pair of headphones
-an external HDMI-connected monitor

Instead, all you have to do once you lay your computer down on the desk is plug in the power cord and plug in a single thunderbolt cable which connects all the above listed things directly to your computer through a single port!

I do that today....when I plug in my Thunderbolt display.

Re other poster's comments on 1394: FW800, sorry, but it's much slower than USB 3 in the real world. Yes there is a lot of pro-audio hardware out there that uses it right now. I expect that'll migrate to TB over time. I expect the next gen Mac's to only have a TB port and maybe 1 USB port (probably still 2.0 unfortunately), so you're going to end up with some kind of bridge anyway (probably a FW to USB3 bridge on PC's actually). FW HD's are darn expensive (like $80 for the enclosure alone) because there aren't many produced, and the marginal performance gains are a tough sell at that premium. The advantage to a TB->USB bridge, is that the devices are cheap.

TB's price will drop when the new controllers come online (expected Q1/Q2), and over time will come down as volume rises. Belkin's mistake was 1) announcing something 9 months in advance, in an industry that changes in 9 weeks, 2) giving a price now, when economics will certainly change by then, and 3) missing two key port types that are missing from most Mac's. In other words, their market research and marketing departments blew it.

I'd pay $300 for this thing if 1) it were ready today, 2) included eSata and USB 3.0, knowing full well that in 6 month's it'd be $200, and in a year $99. That's the early adopter premium.

 

[AidenShaw]

I'd pay $300 for this thing if 1) it were ready today, 2) included eSata and USB 3.0, knowing full well that in 6 month's it'd be $200, and in a year $99. That's the early adopter premium.

+10

That's a good attitude - as long as it has the features you want, decide to pay extra for having it now rather than later.

(I'm a repeat victim of that rationalization - spent over $1200 on my first VCR, over $800 for my first CD player, over $1000 for my first BD player, and I won't admit how much for my first 1080p 46" LCD....)

 

[triceretops]

Too little/too much

If it had DVI so I didn't have to plug an adapter into it,
If it had USB 3
If it had more than 1 Firewire port
and if it cost less the $300
I might consider it.

 

[cuestakid]

I do that today....when I plug in my Thunderbolt display.

Re other poster's comments on 1394: FW800, sorry, but it's much slower than USB 3 in the real world. Yes there is a lot of pro-audio hardware out there that uses it right now. I expect that'll migrate to TB over time. I expect the next gen Mac's to only have a TB port and maybe 1 USB port (probably still 2.0 unfortunately), so you're going to end up with some kind of bridge anyway (probably a FW to USB3 bridge on PC's actually). FW HD's are darn expensive (like $80 for the enclosure alone) because there aren't many produced, and the marginal performance gains are a tough sell at that premium. The advantage to a TB->USB bridge, is that the devices are cheap.

TB's price will drop when the new controllers come online (expected Q1/Q2), and over time will come down as volume rises. Belkin's mistake was 1) announcing something 9 months in advance, in an industry that changes in 9 weeks, 2) giving a price now, when economics will certainly change by then, and 3) missing two key port types that are missing from most Mac's. In other words, their market research and marketing departments blew it.

I'd pay $300 for this thing if 1) it were ready today, 2) included eSata and USB 3.0, knowing full well that in 6 month's it'd be $200, and in a year $99. That's the early adopter premium.

I said this on an earlier post so I will just give a summary of what i said-

Thunderbolt is the new Bluray\HD-DVD-few products, high prices and limited actual consumer adoption. Fortunately, now that Intel has opened up the spec to everyone, we will see more devices as the year goes on.

I really think we all just need to have patience-someone will make something like this for less than Belkin.

----------

+10

that's a good attitude - as long as it has the features you want, decide to pay extra for having it now rather than later.

(i'm a repeat victim of that rationalization - spent over $1200 on my first vcr, over $800 for my first cd player, over $1000 for my first bd player, and i won't admit how much for my first 1080p 46" lcd....)

1 milllllllllllllllllllllllllllllion dollllllars !!!!!

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

Still way too much money and the abscence of USB 3.0 is a deal breaker. Cut the price in half and add that and then you have a product people will want to buy.

$299 for a HUB? No PCI with that? At that price point, it SHOULD have it. What a freaking rip-off. I can't wait to see how many more 'cheap' ThunderFART products come out for these machines....

It SHOULD have USB 3.0, 10Gigabit Ethernet (my 2001 Digital Audio has regular Gigabit for goodness sake!) and eSata ports on it. It has NONE of those. It has the same flipping ports all the Macs already come with! They couldn't even provide a convenience FW400 port for audio workstation boxes, etc. And THREE whole USB 2.0 ports? Wow! That's some freaking hub! I've seen $40 hubs come with at least SIX ports.

 

[199708]

I'm not sure your point. USB 3.0 has been available longer, is backwards compatible, is 10x faster than USB 2.0, and the USB3.0 devices are like $10 more than their USB 2.0 counterparts. If that's not enough reason for someone to choose USB3.0 over TB, I don't know what is.

Part of TB's mistake is trying to do everything. Apple and others seem to have never heard of the term "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." The world adopted USB back in the mid-90s...it's a standard. It's been upgraded over time and the upgrades have been evolutionary.

TB is trying to be revolutionary. But TB is just far too expensive and far too scarce (there are like 10 TB devices). TB, I'm afraid, will fail miserably. It's really not an intentional war between USB3.0 and TB...it's more like a "hey, the world has USB and why do you want me to spend $1000 on TB?" for 90% of the consumers out there. USB3.0 isn't ubiquitous quite yet...but for $30 you can buy a card for your pc...or $50 for a Mac. My bet is that 2012 most newly-designed Wintels will have 1-2 USB 3.0 slots for free (currently about a $25 add-on at checkout).

Top post.
I purchased five 2.5" 7200rpm 750 gb drives for about $80US each, the case cost me $12 each, it is super fast on my pc, but once I need to transfer uncompressed 422 video files and raw images to and from my Mac in large quantitys, it's painfully slow. I have no other choice for the same price point.

USB works with my printer, scanner ( barely used these days), cf card reader. All these are USB 2 and work on USB 3 , I'm sure a USB 3 cf card reader will work on USB 2 devices also. Meaning its the same port that's treated me well over the last 10years will continue to satisfy my needs.
Tb is not worth the money. Perhaps if I was a large organization and every second counts the yes. But then I would be running far more advanced storage solutions like those of EMC.

USB cheap, if my case fails, another $12 does not hurt my bank balance.

My MacBook pro is 3years old today, I feel it will be time to upgrade to a new notebook later this year, but hoping by then intels new chips for macs will have USB 3 or I'll just go out and get powerful windows notebook as now Ive changed over to premier for most of my work.

 

[Erendiox]

"Performance-oriented" hard drives switched to USB 3.0 about a year or more ago - 1394 is dead.

Dead? You must be joking.

I sell video equipment to some of the biggest production houses in NYC. If they're not going for a 4+ drive raid system that uses eSATA, miniSAS, or External PCI, they are using standard drives over firewire 800. It is also still the premiere connection for any independent filmmaker, most of whom can't afford anything faster.

Not to mention that not a single mac has USB 3.0 built in, and ALL of them have Firewire. I have sold very few USB 3.0 PCI cards, and even fewer USB 3.0 drives. The potential is there, but it has far from replaced 1394 in the real world.

 

[PlaceofDis]

i cannot believe the price of this thing. its a niche market i suppose.

hopefully TB will be adopted and become more of a standard soon. but until its on everything its just going to be an expensive niche add on.

 

[ghettochris]

Even though USB and eSATA are many times faster than 1394, they're not good enough for pro users?

How did anyone get anything done before T-Bolt arrived? (Oh, wait. We're still waiting for it to "arrive" outside of a few outrageously priced items.)

Thunderbolt is 66% faster than esata 6.0, and 100% faster than usb 3.0, how is the $1150 4 tb raid array outrageously overpriced for this huge performance increase? For anything data intensive the time saved is significant, and probably makes financial sense to buy one of these if it's for business that ever waits for hard drives to do their thing.

figure you are paying $500 for the drives and $650 for the enclosure, esata 4 bay raid enclosure are like $200-300, so that one time $350-450 extra cost for your hard drives working 66-100% faster isn't worth it? Assuming someones time is worth $20/hr, they would only have to save about 20 hours of time over their lifetime to be worth it, lets just say 1 year, that's less than a half hour per week. If 66% increase in data speed doesn't save you a half hour per week, its probably not worth it for you, but outrageously priced? that seems a little extreme. I know many who would save hours per week with that increase. How did things get done before thunderbolt? more waiting Whether it's an extra couple minutes to transfer a big file you need to work on or an extra second to open a file, it all adds up. Real pros probably had the fiber channel stuff before, so all the thunderbolt stuff must seem cheap. I was never pro enough to justify fiber channel, but being able to use thunderbolt on a mac mini or imac or even macbook air for a few hundred lets me get more done in a given amount of time and easy to justify.

Hard drives are the bottleneck of the computer and what I find I wait on the most next to the cpu for rendering, so those pegasus raid Thunderbolt arrays seem like a bargain to me.

 

[Zaphodsplanet]

PC guys should love this

I personally am really starting to get used to my desk having one cord running to the power outlet... and nothing else. Still wish Apple would make a full sized bluetooth keyboard (with the number pad... love the nice thin keyboards they have had for a long time now), but other than that I'm in cord free hog heaven. I've got a nice clean desk, uncluttered ....no freaking rats nest of cables. Just lots of room to spill stuff....LOL

Unfortunately my iMac is not new enough to have the Thunderbolt connection. Guess if I had it, and when I decided to get a drive array of some kind, I'd cable tie it to the power cord.

 

[AidenShaw]

Dead? You must be joking.

I sell video equipment to some of the biggest production houses in NYC. If they're not going for a 4+ drive raid system that uses eSATA, miniSAS, or External PCI, they are using standard drives over firewire 800. It is also still the premiere connection for any independent filmmaker, most of whom can't afford anything faster.

So, instead of an eSATA RAID at 3 Gbps, they do a software RAID with a number of daisy-chained 1394b drives? How does shared 0.8 Gbps beat 3.0 Gbps or 6.0 Gbps in any way?

And do professionals really do RAID across daisy-chained external drives? It's a concept that boggles my mind. I do RAID with external eSATA port-multiplier cases - because it's much more error-tolerant than five individual daisy-chained cases.

Not to mention that not a single mac has USB 3.0 built in, and ALL of them have Firewire. I have sold very few USB 3.0 PCI cards, and even fewer USB 3.0 drives. The potential is there, but it has far from replaced 1394 in the real world.

Now we see the real truth. You're selling to people with Apples, so you don't see that the world is moving to ports that Apples don't support.

 

[ghettochris]

(I'm a repeat victim of that rationalization - spent over $1200 on my first VCR, over $800 for my first CD player, over $1000 for my first BD player, and I won't admit how much for my first 1080p 46" LCD....)

lol. thanks for paving the way for the rest of us I though i was bad. I never bothered with HDTV and simply replaced all my vcr's, tvs, dvd player with the computer.

 

[Zaphodsplanet]

Belkin.... we come up with good ideas

about 6 months to 3 years after you did.

 

[AidenShaw]

Thunderbolt is 66% faster than esata 6.0

...and people say that Americans are falling behind at math....

(In what parallel universe is 10 Gbps 66% faster than 6 Gbps?)

Edit: My bad - I was thinking backwards....

how is the $1150 4 tb raid array outrageously overpriced for this huge performance increase?

People who require 4 TB drives are rare, and they are accustomed to paying much more per GB than the common folk.

esata 4 bay raid enclosure are like $200-300

Not true, I just bought a couple of Sans Digital 4-drive enclosures for $80 each.

Hard drives are the bottleneck of the computer and what I find I wait on the most next to the cpu for rendering, so those pegasus raid Thunderbolt arrays seem like a bargain to me.

How many do you own today?

----------

lol. Thanks for paving the way for the rest of us :d i though i was bad. I never bothered with hdtv and simply replaced all my vcr's, tvs, dvd player with the computer.

!!

 

[ancelrick]

thunderbolt is slipping away into the light

don't tell Asus , Acer and Lenovo or some folks may lose their jobs.

 

[grahamnp]

This is quite ridiculous, all it does is put all the MBP's existing ports in a nice box. I realise some people like having a docking station but 299 for the convenience is a bit much.

How about a simple TB -> USB 3.0 hub? Any audio functionality can be added on via USB sound cards, very few people still use Firewire and nobody wants more USB 2.0.

 

[Erendiox]

So, instead of an eSATA RAID at 3 Gbps, they do a software RAID with a number of daisy-chained 1394b drives? How does shared 0.8 Gbps beat 3.0 Gbps or 6.0 Gbps in any way?

And do professionals really do RAID across daisy-chained external drives? It's a concept that boggles my mind. I do RAID with external eSATA port-multiplier cases - because it's much more error-tolerant than five individual daisy-chained cases.

I never said anything about doing a software RAID over firewire drives. I agree that is ridiculous. I'm talking about the people who don't use RAID, or people who use simple, two drive enclosures. They are usually using firewire. Sometimes eSATA.

Now we see the real truth. You're selling to people with Apples, so you don't see that the world is moving to ports that Apples don't support.

Yes, you've caught me. I work at an apple centric location. Where I am, nobody really cares about USB 3.0.

Regardless of our environments, 1394 is hardly "dead" as you say. I can attest that many, many people still put it to good use, including myself.

 

[haruhiko]

I LIKE IT!
-an ethernet cord for internet
-a USB dongle for your wireless mouse
-a USB dongle for your iPod
-a USB cord for your printer
-a firewire 800 cord for an external hard drive
-a pair of headphones
-an external HDMI-connected monitor

My current answer to the problems above (not perfect, but feasible):

1. WiFi! (although not as fast)
2. I'm very satisfied with the trackpad on the MacBooks. Or use a bluetooth mouse.
3. connecting my iPod/iPhone/iPad to the already plugged in USB cord is not that difficult
4. Printer shared wirelessly by Airport routers
5. External harddrive shared wirelessly by Airport routers (although not as fast)
6. Vaid. (I never had the need to plug in earphones to the laptop anyway...)
7. Valid.