I plan on getting an iMac this week, and one of the main reasons for switching to MAC is for thunderbolt connectivity. But looking around for Thunderbolt external HDD there is nothing being sold at the moment. Just announced. Are there any Thunderbolt external HDD out yet?
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So where are the Thunderbolt products?
- Thread starter Zelnaga
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At the moment, no. OEMs have said Q2 so we should see something within two months. Computex looks quite promising time frame for releases.
Thunderbolt HDD's are pointless, as eSATA at 3gb/s isn't going to use all of the bandwidth. Thunderbolt is even more overkill. Of course, you'd be hard pressed to find a mac with eSATA....
They are not pointless since thunderbolt is a shared bus with a maximum capacity of 10gbps in the copper variant. Add a display and you could get close to maximum. Even esata is overkill for today's drives.
Esata has no power and is limited to 1 meter. Tb has 7 watts and a 100m limit.
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Macs don't have eSATA so what is the point? USB 2.0 is ridiculously slow. FW800 is better but even that isn't capable of delivering the maximum bandwidth that HDs can use.
Copper version is only up to 3 meters.
the OP is considering switching TO mac and OS X. I'm simply informing the OP that there are technologies that - for data transfer - are just as good as TB. At least until SSD's become the norm.
The available ports the iMac offers (USB2.0 and FW800) certainly are not just as good as TB. FW800 has a maximum bandwidth of less than 80MB/s, USB not even half of that.
A single mechanical hard drive can reach 145MB/s these days, saturating the FW800 bus. Think RAID or SSD and TB makes even more sense. It was about time that Macs got a faster interface for externals and just for the record, SATA II doesn't cut it either. A single port is good for 275MB/s, not sufficient for RAIDs in case that the port supports PM, yet sufficient for 6Gb/s SSDs.