Confused about Target Disk Mode

[NutsNGum]

As an example,

If I have a Thunderbolt-capable MBP (or potentially Air) which I hook up to a Thunderbolt-capable iMac, am I using that MacBook Pro essentially as a hard drive with the iMac's CPU doing the work?

Is it a feasible way to take advantage of the SSD in either of those two portable options?

For the record, I'm aware that I could use target display, although I'm more interested in taking advantage of the processing capacity of the iMac.

Thanks, Nuts.

 

[Detrius]

The machine you boot up holding down the T key turns into an external hard drive. That's all there is to it. Treat it like an external hard drive.

 

[NutsNGum]

Thanks, Detrius.

 

[barefeats]

I did some Thunderbolt Target Disk testing this weekend between two 2011 MacBook Pros with Apple (Toshiba) 3Gb/s SSDs (each capable of 200MB/s). Using both Finder Copy of a 1.2G file and QuickBench Extended test, the transfer rate averaged 62MB/s at best.

Doing some digging, I learned that Target mode is very different from connecting to an external Thunderbolt drive. Target mode uses EFI. External Tbolt storage uses OS X. OS X can do multi-threaded, multi-block DMA transfers. EFI can’t.

 

[NutsNGum]

Thanks for clarifying that, Barefeats, I've just bought a (new, but obviously not new) 160GB X25-m G2 at a really good price on eBay, so it will probably end up going in an t-bolt enclosure/GoFlex T-bolt connector when they're eventually released.