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Thunderbolt Blu Ray Burner
- Thread starter dtown218
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Just the Sonnet Echo 15, which is crazy expensive if that's the only feature you need. Optical drives just don't need the speed of Thunderbolt, so there's little need for an optical-only enclosure.
The previous responders are correct.
A 6x Blu-ray drive maxes out around 320 Mbits/second of actual throughput. A 12x drive doubles that, which is still well within the limits of a USB 3.0 connection. Until you get into a 50x plus drive speed, you don't come close to needing a faster connection protocol than USB 3.0. That's being generous and only using 1/2 of the USB3.0 bus bandwidth.
The Sonnet box also has a lot of other stuff potentially on that Thunderbolt connection, including a hard drive, the USB3.0 bus, Gigabit ethernet et al.
Other than wanting to pay too much for the device, there's no value.
The Sonnet box is interesting for the ability to aggregate a number of peripherals into a single location.
A 6x Blu-ray drive maxes out around 320 Mbits/second of actual throughput. A 12x drive doubles that, which is still well within the limits of a USB 3.0 connection. Until you get into a 50x plus drive speed, you don't come close to needing a faster connection protocol than USB 3.0. That's being generous and only using 1/2 of the USB3.0 bus bandwidth.
The Sonnet box also has a lot of other stuff potentially on that Thunderbolt connection, including a hard drive, the USB3.0 bus, Gigabit ethernet et al.
Other than wanting to pay too much for the device, there's no value.
The Sonnet box is interesting for the ability to aggregate a number of peripherals into a single location.
And the Sonnet docking station is interesting in that it is still not available to ship to anyone...
Sonnet seems to have a reputation of announcing conceptual products that make a lot of sense to the marketplace, yet fails to deliver. The docking station with internal blu-ray drive was announced at NAB this past April, and only a photo was shown in their booth. No actual prototype. They repeated the HW vaporware again last week at the Intel Developers forum and this week at the International Broadcasting conference, but doing a little better showing a Thunderbolt 2 PCIe expansion chassis. Nice sign, but no actual working prototype being shown. Need to get their PR and marketing people aligned with their development engineers.
Not sure what benefit they get other than headlines.
There is no need to get a Blu-ray drive with a Thunderbolt interface. The bandwidth offers no benefit.
Also, the 6x and 12x drives performance is not over the entire disc surface. Really only benefits the outer tracks. ave your money for a Thunderbolt equipped SSD or a better computer.
Added: I'm getting great burning with my LG BP40NS20. Simple, single USB 2.0 connection. No external AC power adater required; no dual USB connector required for connection. Handles CD, DVD, and Blu-ray burning; even those very rare 100GB BDXL discs. This is a 6x blu-ray burner.
Sonnet seems to have a reputation of announcing conceptual products that make a lot of sense to the marketplace, yet fails to deliver. The docking station with internal blu-ray drive was announced at NAB this past April, and only a photo was shown in their booth. No actual prototype. They repeated the HW vaporware again last week at the Intel Developers forum and this week at the International Broadcasting conference, but doing a little better showing a Thunderbolt 2 PCIe expansion chassis. Nice sign, but no actual working prototype being shown. Need to get their PR and marketing people aligned with their development engineers.
Not sure what benefit they get other than headlines.
There is no need to get a Blu-ray drive with a Thunderbolt interface. The bandwidth offers no benefit.
Also, the 6x and 12x drives performance is not over the entire disc surface. Really only benefits the outer tracks. ave your money for a Thunderbolt equipped SSD or a better computer.
Added: I'm getting great burning with my LG BP40NS20. Simple, single USB 2.0 connection. No external AC power adater required; no dual USB connector required for connection. Handles CD, DVD, and Blu-ray burning; even those very rare 100GB BDXL discs. This is a 6x blu-ray burner.
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Sonnet is taking pre-orders on their website: http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echo15thunderboltdock.html
It's (un)available without blu-ray too.
Pre-orders are not the same as getting approved devices into the hand of reviewers and end-users.
My pre-order has not been delivered. Thankfully, haven't charged my credit card yet.
This is a great example of amazing Apple advertising, making people think they need Thunderbolt for *everything* 