The state of thunderbolt drives is horrible!

[MCAsan]

Surprised? Why is that?

It would never occur to me to not open the hood, dump any spinning HD and put in an SSD. I have building PCs for over 20 years, so it would not phase me to open up a Macbook. For my niece I put in a 500GB SSD and 8GB of memory. That upgrade gave a new life to her 2010 white Macbook.

 

[bniu]

The biggest problem with Thunderbolt is that it is way too expensive. The target audience of Thunderbolt tends to demand heavy customization and selling drives that are non-replaceable goes against what the target audience wants. What I want from thunderbolt is a simple enclosure and nothing more. I can decide for myself what kind of drives I want. I also want to be able to self-upgrade the RAID drives I have installed in the enclosure. With thunderbolt, i want 100% complete control over my drives, enclosure and what drives I put inside. I don't want those decisions made for me.

My deal with computers is either I want it to be 100% integrated like my MacBook Pro, or have 100% complete control over customization like my desktop tower. With USB 3.0, I'm okay with drives being tightly integrated. With thunderbolt, I want complete control over my configuration.

 

[Imaginator]

Weird, I've got tons of Thunderbolt drives.

 

[SaSaSushi]

The biggest problem with Thunderbolt is that it is way too expensive.

What I want from thunderbolt is a simple enclosure and nothing more. I can decide for myself what kind of drives I want.

That's exactly what I want too. It's also what I happen to have and it was reasonably inexpensive too.

 

[macsforever]

Very surprised someone is booting routinely from external drive. If I had old Macbook Pro with HD, I would would replace it with internal SSD. For a rMBP 2012, Transcend now offers replacement SSD for SATA. And we can get fast 1TB PCIe SSDs in 2013 rMBPs.

My use case is likely unusual. I have the 840 partitioned to be bootable in an emergency. The large partition is for Time Machine backups of the internal 768GB SSD when I am on the road. I don't care about trim. When I get home from a 2-3 week trip and move the photos to my permanent library drives, I can reformat the Samsung without any problem. So for me, trim has no serious advantage and an external power supply is a big negative.

I know more manufacturers are really going PCIe protocols through TB. My UA Apollo does, and it's ROCK SOLID! More solid than any PCIe card I've ever used in the past and this is all TB.... nice and easy to use. I have racks to keep my stuff in so there's NO clutter like some state with the TB cables.
I know EPCIe is forthcoming... we'll have to see if Apple gets on board with this protocol too. But I feel once TB goes true optical, there's really nothing going to compete with it... at least for a while.