Thunderbolt HD Enclosure/Dock?

[whitenoise]

So, I can guess that I'm not the only one looking for this, but I don't seem to be able to find a hint that such a thing is going to be available any time soon.

Since I couldn't bring myself to pay the premium for the Apple SSD, I thought I would wait and use a small external thunderbolt SSD as a boot drive and the internal HD as storage.

Are there any indications about manufacturers for a TB Enclosure/Dock or are these going to be a long time off? I can't justify the expense of the current TB solutions, but an enclosure would give me the ability to pay for the drive I could afford now...maybe upgrade later....

Anyway thanks for any info.

 

[brand]

Are there any indications about manufacturers for a TB Enclosure/Dock or are these going to be a long time off?

There have been manufactures that have committed to ThunderBolt hard drives but we have no way of knowing there product development/release times. It could be tomorrow it could be next year. I would guess later rather than sooner.

 

[whitenoise]

That was my feeling/dread...I was hoping that there had been some noises, now that there are multiple devices with ThunderBolt.

I still find it odd that didnt have one expensive dock available for sale when tb was first included. Maybe one day.....

 

[brand]

I still find it odd that didnt have one expensive dock available for sale when tb was first included. Maybe one day.....

Why would Apple get in the business of creating external hard drive docks in an already over saturated market? Thats what third party manufactures are for, Apple has more important things to worry about.

 

[admanimal]

While waiting for some kind of Thunderbolt SSD solution, I just went ahead and put an SSD I already had in a FW800 enclosure and I use it as the boot drive on my new iMac. It still makes a huge difference even though the SSD can't operate at full speed in some cases.

 

[brand]

While waiting for some kind of Thunderbolt SSD solution, I just went ahead and put an SSD I already had in a FW800 enclosure and I use it as the boot drive on my new iMac. It still makes a huge difference even though the SSD can't operate at full speed in some cases.

A SSD in a FW800 enclosure the SSD will never operate at it full speed. A traditional rotational platter hard drive will max out the FW800 interface. Given that your iMac would perform better booting from the internal hard drive.

 

[admanimal]

A SSD in a FW800 enclosure the SSD will never operate at it full speed. A traditional rotational platter hard drive will max out the FW800 interface. Given that your iMac would perform better booting from the internal hard drive.

The thing about SSDs that allow them to make a computer feel so much faster is their random read and write performance. A standard platter drive will max out around 1-2 megabytes per second for these operations, whereas an average SSD can do somewhere around 30-40MBps at least. The SSD's numbers are generally within the capabilities of a FW800 connection, and this is why using a FW800-attached SSD will provide a noticeable performance boost over an internal HDD for pretty much everything except reading/writing large files.

And like I said, I use this FW800 setup and it does provide a very noticeable performance boost; this is not theoretical conjecture- it's a fact. There are several threads on here with others experiencing similar results.