Yes, Blu Ray at 21x should be just marginally faster than the actual speed of FW800.
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Thunderbolt Blu-Ray expected?
- Thread starter StrudelTurnover
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Yes, Blu Ray at 21x should be just marginally faster than the actual speed of FW800.
No, you obviously did not understand my analogy,even though it was already explained to you. You are missing the point by quite a bit.
OP here, I <3 a good necro. 
In case anyone is curious, I went with the Samsung SE-506 at a great price, which uses two USB2 ports feeding into one USB mini-B plug. Aside from the tray latch being flimsy, writing performance at 4X has been good. Plus I recently got the OSX Blu-ray player app and it's great.
Let me turn this around and see if it helps...
If cars couldn't go faster than what safe road speeds are, there would be no such thing as posted speed limits. But faster cars do get manufactured, just as faster optical drives do. When optical drive speeds eventually surpass whatever the lowest working bus speed is (say USB2), that will become the limiting factor. To correct your quote above, the 5 lane freeway actually has a theoretical top speed of whatever is driving on it, just as data has a theoretical top speed of its electrons or light pulses.
Calling it a USB3 drive isn't right, that is just an interface. To bring it back to the car analogy, you get different speeds and different miles per gallon in the city versus on the highway. We'll call that interface throughput for small and large files. Anything mechanical like seek time applies to the car, and not the road.
You probably already know, optical media drives historically have a multiplier that reflects data transfer rate beyond the lowest standard rate for its media. For CD-ROMs, this was 150 KB/s as defined in the Rainbow Books. (I owned one of the stopgap 3X NEC drives. Usually they don't do odd numbers anymore.)
So yes, you expect a device to go as fast as its bottleneck allows. I have over a dozen USB devices plugged in to my iMac (and need to disconnect two drives to burn a BD-R). If Firewire or Thunderbolt, or an independent USB3 bus can avoid that hub bottleneck (for something as important as optical media writing), you expect better performance from the same device. Just as a car should run smoother at highway speeds without traffic.
Hope that doesn't destroy the analogy completely.
In case anyone is curious, I went with the Samsung SE-506 at a great price, which uses two USB2 ports feeding into one USB mini-B plug. Aside from the tray latch being flimsy, writing performance at 4X has been good. Plus I recently got the OSX Blu-ray player app and it's great.
Let me turn this around and see if it helps...
If cars couldn't go faster than what safe road speeds are, there would be no such thing as posted speed limits. But faster cars do get manufactured, just as faster optical drives do. When optical drive speeds eventually surpass whatever the lowest working bus speed is (say USB2), that will become the limiting factor. To correct your quote above, the 5 lane freeway actually has a theoretical top speed of whatever is driving on it, just as data has a theoretical top speed of its electrons or light pulses.
Calling it a USB3 drive isn't right, that is just an interface. To bring it back to the car analogy, you get different speeds and different miles per gallon in the city versus on the highway. We'll call that interface throughput for small and large files. Anything mechanical like seek time applies to the car, and not the road.
You probably already know, optical media drives historically have a multiplier that reflects data transfer rate beyond the lowest standard rate for its media. For CD-ROMs, this was 150 KB/s as defined in the Rainbow Books. (I owned one of the stopgap 3X NEC drives. Usually they don't do odd numbers anymore.)
So yes, you expect a device to go as fast as its bottleneck allows. I have over a dozen USB devices plugged in to my iMac (and need to disconnect two drives to burn a BD-R). If Firewire or Thunderbolt, or an independent USB3 bus can avoid that hub bottleneck (for something as important as optical media writing), you expect better performance from the same device. Just as a car should run smoother at highway speeds without traffic.
Hope that doesn't destroy the analogy completely.
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There aren't hard drives that saturate USB 3.0 and those have more than one disk, neither will there be optical disks that can, at least in this decade.
Actually I think what they expect is that a USB 3 connected Bluray drive would be faster than a USB 2 connected drive.
At least that is how I interpreted what they said.