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Possible Use for Thunderbolt

P

pgyanke

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 4, 2011
48
0
When I bought my new MacBook Pro, I included a DVI to HDMI cord to be able to connect it my TV for Hulu, Netflix, et al.

I had an inspiration tonight, though. Thunderbolt is supposed to be bi-directional. Couldn't I use this port to input video to my MacBook? For example, I want to digitize some old VHS tapes without having to buy a bunch of additional hardware. I connected my VCR to my MacBook through the HDMI to DVI cord into Thunderbolt and... nothing. iMovie didn't register it as an input source.

I hope updates are coming (Lion?) which will give such abilities... or am I just hoping for a pipe dream?
 
pgyanke said:
or am I just hoping for a pipe dream?
Click to expand...

Bingo.

That cable is specifically designed for one-way communication - Mini-DisplayPort to HDMI output.

Perhaps in the future there will be something...but I would not hold your breath. That seems a bit niche for 2011.
 
pgyanke said:
When I bought my new MacBook Pro, I included a DVI to HDMI cord to be able to connect it my TV for Hulu, Netflix, et al.

I had an inspiration tonight, though. Thunderbolt is supposed to be bi-directional. Couldn't I use this port to input video to my MacBook? For example, I want to digitize some old VHS tapes without having to buy a bunch of additional hardware. I connected my VCR to my MacBook through the HDMI to DVI cord into Thunderbolt and... nothing. iMovie didn't register it as an input source.

I hope updates are coming (Lion?) which will give such abilities... or am I just hoping for a pipe dream?
Click to expand...

Regardless of whatever you do, you'll be buying additional hardware.
 
One thing I was wondering, could you connect two macs together with a thunderbolt cable to transfer files?
 
At the moment no it is not possible because there is no such cable release yet. However, thunderbolt can definitely do that.
 
josh1231 said:
One thing I was wondering, could you connect two macs together with a thunderbolt cable to transfer files?
Click to expand...

Like Cr0nus said, the new macs support Target Disk Mode trough TB, but there's no cables available yet.
 
LinkMx said:
Like Cr0nus said, the new macs support Target Disk Mode trough TB, but there's no cables available yet.
Click to expand...

Just to add that it's not going to be much, if any faster than FW800 connection since the HD is the bottleneck. SSD to SSD, RAID to SSD or RAID to RAID would be faster though.
 
Hellhammer said:
Just to add that it's not going to be much, if any faster than FW800 connection since the HD is the bottleneck. SSD to SSD, RAID to SSD or RAID to RAID would be faster though.
Click to expand...

It should be significantly faster, because I believe Firewire 800 is the bottleneck, not the drive. If I'm not mistaken, wouldn't an internal SATA drive be about 4 times faster than a Firewire connection?
 
josh1231 said:
It should be significantly faster, because I believe Firewire 800 is the bottleneck, not the drive. If I'm not mistaken, wouldn't an internal SATA drive be about 4 times faster than a Firewire connection?
Click to expand...

You are correct.

FW800 = 0.8Gbp/s

SATA = 3Gbp/s or 6Gbp/s on newer drives.

Thunderbolt: 10Gbp/s

Which means that in theory, the SATA interface will be the bottleneck over Thunderbolt for the time being! WOW! Imagine maxing out your SSDs... I can't wait just to try it out. LOL
 
josh1231 said:
It should be significantly faster, because I believe Firewire 800 is the bottleneck, not the drive. If I'm not mistaken, wouldn't an internal SATA drive be about 4 times faster than a Firewire connection?
Click to expand...

The interface doesn't matter. Most 2.5" SATA drives can't even provide a steady 80MB/s speed which is the real world maximum of FW800. I would say the average speed of 2.5" HD is around 70MB/s although it depends on the capacity and rpm.

Thunderbolt is way overhyped because people think they can get 10Gb/s with normal equipment. In real world, that cannot be achieved without some kind of RAID setup and they cost a big penny. Even then, you would need at least six HDs or two good SATA 6Gb/s SSDs to get close to 900MB/s (maximum of TB). With a regular 2.5" or 3.5" HD, your maximum speed will be less than 150MB/s, depending on the HD. eSATA and USB 3.0 have been able to provide that for quite a good time now.

Another point is that both ends need to be able to do that. If you're transferring data from your internal 2.5" HD to 8-bay RAID 0 box, it won't be any faster than the read speed of your internal HD. You need some serious cash to get rid of the bottlenecks.
 
Somehow, I only just stumbled upon Logic Node, and the wonders it provides (it's basically distributed computing, like SETI, or XGrid, or a million others). People use it over firewire and gigabit ethernet now, but once that elusive thunderbolt cable is out, surely it'll kick even more arse over that?
I'm not sure how it works entirely, but I'd imagine that if it could bypass writing anything to the HD (possibly just reading it from the "host" drive), and was just shifting the data to/from CPU and RAM on both (or more) machines, that'd be pretty impressive, no?
 
This may be a bit off topic but has anyone even heard about anything even remotely related to this port?

I haven't seen any announcements about future products or plans for future products.

All I hear is the wind rustling...........
 
pgyanke said:
I've had a Panasonic DMR ES45V for a few years now... and it has HDMI output for both DVD and VHS. ;)
Click to expand...

Cool. I didn't think they made such a thing. I am sure there will be some external boxes to do what you need when thunderbolt gets a bit more established.
 
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