This right here is why I already planned my computer purchases through Windows 8's release in 2012. My dream computer is a 8" tablet that I can dock and use as a desktop.
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So is it safe to say Thunderbolt has been ... Underwhelming thus far?
- Thread starter Adamantoise
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Thunderbolt doesn't have enough bandwidth for a lot of graphics cards, especially gaming cards, and even if you plug one into Thunderbolt, it'll only work with an external monitor.
Thunderbolt is working fine. The problem is people have unrealistic expectations.
Thunderbolt is working fine. The problem is people have unrealistic expectations.
Agreed. Until Nvidia and AMD start incorporating Thunderbolt to their graphics card, I don't really see this technology picking up.
And yes, it's all up to the 3rd party companies. FireWire didn't really get going until Sony adopted it as IEEE 1394 either.
Whats the point unless your talking 4 256SSD in RAID 0 a FW connection will be almost as fast as the HDD..
HDD = ~90MB/s (720Mbps)
2 HDD in RAID 0 over FW800 = 125MB/s (800Mbps) Bottlenecked!
2 HDD in RAID 0 over Thunderbolt = ~180MB/s (1440Mbps or 1.44Gbps)
Already this setup is faster than the internal HDD.
SSD = ~400MB/s (3.6Gbps)
4 SSD in RAID 0 over FW800 = 125MB/s (800Mbps) Bottlenecked!
4 SSD in RAID 0 over Thunderbolt = 1.25GB/s (10Gbps) Bottlenecked!
Your point is moot.
I guess you're right.
I really do want an external graphics card. I mean how cool would that be? When I go home for Thanksgiving or any family function I could just pack it in the bag with me and actually play Civ 5 like it was meant to be played.
Furthermore, it has more bandwidth than Gigabit Ethernet, one could literally connect two devices to each other and share data (provided the HDD or SSD wouldn't bottle neck the transfer).
Ultimately though, I'd like to see this incorporated into routers and other networking equipment.
I'm really excited to see what they are going to do with this. I wish I had the capital to start my own pet projects with this tech.
not to me
At work I was asked to buy an Apple Thunderbolt Display for one of our people. I explained to the supervisor that I thought they were overpriced for the functionality but was told to proceed. So I did.
It's a very slick companion to the MacBook Pro or MacBook Air. I don't know if I want one badly enough to throw down my own cash for it, but I'd love to have that setup at home.
Beyond that, someone has to innovate or we'll be stuck with USB forever. Of course, it will be Apple taking it to market first, and of course, they will be ahead of the market by a few years.
At work I was asked to buy an Apple Thunderbolt Display for one of our people. I explained to the supervisor that I thought they were overpriced for the functionality but was told to proceed. So I did.
It's a very slick companion to the MacBook Pro or MacBook Air. I don't know if I want one badly enough to throw down my own cash for it, but I'd love to have that setup at home.
Beyond that, someone has to innovate or we'll be stuck with USB forever. Of course, it will be Apple taking it to market first, and of course, they will be ahead of the market by a few years.
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I'm not sure it is Apple's fault with how fast TBolt technology catches on. In my opinion, it's the lack of options that makes it disappointing. It's like owning a hydrogen car and there only being one fueling station within 500 miles. It's sweet to have, but requires an investment on our part. If all my monitors and external HDD were outfitted with this technology I'd be stoked. I'm not stoked to have to buy three different adapters depending on what configuration my monitor has. I'm at HDMI and VGA so far. I need DVI but I don't want to use my VGA to DVI adapter as I'm not sure what kind of signal degradation occurs.
Adding an advanced port that has little support is one thing. Removing the next fastest connector (eSata) and not having peripherals to compete is a step backwards in my opinion. I spent $2k on a new iMac and now the fastest I can access my external drives is 800Mbps through Firewire vs. the 3Gbps the old machine had via eSata! If we're not going to get TB peripherals at a reasonable price, that is one thing, but we should at least have some way to be on par with the older systems - a TB to eSata converter for example. I've seen USB3, Ethernet and FW800, but where is the eSata connector. The promotional page on TB even mentions eSata through TB, but nothing, unless you want to buy a Sonnet Express Card converter and Express Card eSata for over $200!
Umm what? TB works on Snow Leopard. Remember, the early 2011's that ran SL had working TB ports...
What more is Apple to do? All but one of their computers is equipped with Thunderbolt. It's now up to the peripheral manufacturers and Intel to push it through. I think it's a great piece of tech and I really want it to succeed but I can see why it's not taking off. I have friends using 2.5" drives over USB 2.0 who don't see why they should be using faster desktop drives over E-SATA/FW800/USB 3.0. They never use more than 3 peripherals. This is representative of the average PC user so the advantages of Thunderbolt are lost on most people.
Thunderbolt isn't at its best if it runs alongside existing standards, it was designed to replace everything and it actually can. If it is offered as the only form of connectivity, everything would be made for TB but nobody wants to make devices for a nascent standard and nobody wants to build around a standard for which there are no supporting devices. It's a chicken and egg scenario.
Thunderbolt isn't at its best if it runs alongside existing standards, it was designed to replace everything and it actually can. If it is offered as the only form of connectivity, everything would be made for TB but nobody wants to make devices for a nascent standard and nobody wants to build around a standard for which there are no supporting devices. It's a chicken and egg scenario.
The year of "exclusivity" thing makes me wonder if Apple has not just squandered that year. Why have an exclusivity period if you don't do much with it? Apple has more than enough clout / juice to have lined up some third party vendors to get more accessories out there during this period IMO.
Exactly.
It was exclusive for a year and no one used it for anything, that's the definition of waste in my opinion.
Well I won't disagree about more products being made for TB it's actually pretty dismal BUT the technology is not. I bought the Pegasus 4R made it a Raid 0 drive with all 4 drives and the reads and writes are as fast as my OWC 6gb. Extreme SSD. That my friends is nothing to sneeze at. Sucker is fast at around 500 reads and writes. I can actually work from it without copying it down to my desktop for speed . So for heavy hitter users that work with CS5 and Raw processing plus design work that have only a MBP ( me) it was worth the large chunk of cash. But again you have to have a need for this horsepower. I'll wait for the next wave to replace my Drobo with FireWire 800 which is slower than a turtle taking a dump midstream. Until than I am pretty dang happy with TB.
It is a nice technology no doubt but of what use is it for 98% of users. The ones that would shed out the money for such an expensive raid syste are very few and you really need to need it.
Most people just want to plug-in an external HDD and use it the best speed the drives got which is usually 90-130MB/s on todays drives and they probably also don't want to spend an arm and a leg on the drive or its enclosure.
Just to buy a FW800 capable drive you have to pay up quite a lot. Just the enclosures are insanely expensive. Still FW800 at about 70MB/s is still limiting.
USB 3.0 does the job with full speed and the controllers cost pretty much nothing. External HDDs with USB 3.0 are cheap, they are available and fast.
Now they would have had to put a controller chip on the logic board. Not much space but still it should have happend with such expensive notebooks.
Yet eSATA is a nobrainer one would think. You can combine them with an USB 2.0 port no space wasted. You need no extra chip just a bit of extra wiring. No space wasted here. eSATA is 6 or 3Gb/s that is very fast. You can plug in bare drives into eSATA it is really convenient. Why didn't they do it?
I think they didn't want any competition for Thunderbolt on the low end. Few people would buy such an expensive Thunderbolt capable RAID thing when they can get an eSATA capable one for a fraction of the money with still enough speed for most people. Thunderbolt adoption would be almost non existent.
That is not a valid excuse though. Even if it was 2 or 3 products really is not the kind of choice that makes one feel they mean business with Thunderbolt.
Most people just want to plug-in an external HDD and use it the best speed the drives got which is usually 90-130MB/s on todays drives and they probably also don't want to spend an arm and a leg on the drive or its enclosure.
Just to buy a FW800 capable drive you have to pay up quite a lot. Just the enclosures are insanely expensive. Still FW800 at about 70MB/s is still limiting.
USB 3.0 does the job with full speed and the controllers cost pretty much nothing. External HDDs with USB 3.0 are cheap, they are available and fast.
Now they would have had to put a controller chip on the logic board. Not much space but still it should have happend with such expensive notebooks.
Yet eSATA is a nobrainer one would think. You can combine them with an USB 2.0 port no space wasted. You need no extra chip just a bit of extra wiring. No space wasted here. eSATA is 6 or 3Gb/s that is very fast. You can plug in bare drives into eSATA it is really convenient. Why didn't they do it?
I think they didn't want any competition for Thunderbolt on the low end. Few people would buy such an expensive Thunderbolt capable RAID thing when they can get an eSATA capable one for a fraction of the money with still enough speed for most people. Thunderbolt adoption would be almost non existent.
That is not a valid excuse though. Even if it was 2 or 3 products really is not the kind of choice that makes one feel they mean business with Thunderbolt.
No my point is not moot.. again FW is fast enough for 1 or 2 HDD in RAID..
you're using best case scenario not real world..
Here is a AJA test this morning. You can run several combinations here but they all are mostly around these numbers. This is the Pegasus R4 model running Raid 0 which is the basic 4 drive Pegasus but I have seen faster speeds for the 6 HD Pegasus running RAID 0. These numbers pretty much mirror my OWC Extreme Pro 6gb SSD for my OS drive. Now even in Raid 5 config. the numbers are really fast as well. My problem has been and this comes down to Apple was pulling the Express card slot out on the 15 inch models which left us users absolutely zero options outside of Firewire 800 for anything external with speed. Hell I certainly could be using E-sata ports at much cheaper costs and been pretty close is my bet to these numbers. Frankly as slow as this tech has come to play it saved the day for us power users and put this on a level of a MacPro since now my external is running more like having 4 internal drives on a MP. Thats the good news the bad news is not enough of these on the market andApple needs to be pushing this tech. better themseleves and not just third party vendors.
This is not just about externals drives and monitors but card readers and a lot of other products needed to sustain a system. A MP does me absolutely zero good in my work as I travel i shoot very high end digital capture 60 mpx raw files and do design work. For video folks its much worse. Granted many people do not need this kind of speed in their systems no question just like some don't need 16gb of ram. But still their are a lot of people like me that really do need this stuff and this kind of technology is very helpful but certainly costly no question I have a lot of money in this laptop setup. That part is not fun. LOL
This is not just about externals drives and monitors but card readers and a lot of other products needed to sustain a system. A MP does me absolutely zero good in my work as I travel i shoot very high end digital capture 60 mpx raw files and do design work. For video folks its much worse. Granted many people do not need this kind of speed in their systems no question just like some don't need 16gb of ram. But still their are a lot of people like me that really do need this stuff and this kind of technology is very helpful but certainly costly no question I have a lot of money in this laptop setup. That part is not fun. LOL
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Except for most people its $1000 for a display, when many people would be happy with some $300 competitor display. Yeah, the thunderbolt display also serves as a fancy port, but jesus, $1000!
The problem is that at 20 Gbps that "cluster" of mac minis, or something, would be pretty bad. 12x QDR infiniband will go at 120 Gbps. So, this cluster of Mac Minis would effectively be using interconnect speeds we saw in cluster in maybe 2006. Even older 12x DDR systems will get 48 Gbps. I guess its work able for some things, but right now that's a pretty painfully slow speed for a cluster.
As far as I know, the only realistic thing the average consumer would use thunderbolt for right now is to connect an external monitor.
Whoop-de-doo.
Whoop-de-doo.