The price is per port. So two Thunderbolt ports would be $20 on its own. The price does not include the additional cost of the circuitry and microchips/transistors/capacitors on the PCB. If you only need one port then it might not seem like a significant deal of money. But it adds up quickly with more ports you add. Not to mention a 2 meter cable for Thunderbolt is $50 all by its lonesome.
I do not know of any hard drive that can use this speed external or other wise. I have tried my ssd on 2.0 and 3.0 and can't tell any change. It might be my system. I don't really know. That being said. If Thunderbolt works as stated I want one or two, three.
Thunderbolt may be a little ahead of it's time but will soon become useful, it will depend on the amount of useful product that come into the market.
The Current SSDs are saturating the SATA 6GB/s, the PCIe SSDs are starting to appear, Thunderbolt may be a stop gap for a while.
The Thunderbolt technology has room for increasing speed, with fiber optics but, will likely increase the price.
Don't see USB3 being adequate for very long.
Hi there
The debate about new technology always starts out in this fashion -- is it worth paying for or is it not.
Eventually --yes -- but when people want to have several TB of data on their portable music / video device.
For example when the tiny Micro sdhc (those one's that go into smart phones as extra storage) cards appeared even 8GB was expensive. Now 32 GB is quite common -- on such a tiny device too and I suppose people will want the 64 and 128 GB cards if and when they appear too.
(With these sizes it's now worth playing your music at CD quality as a lot of players will now play FLAC and 32GB gives you a decent amount of music LOSSLESSLY compressed via FLAC -- approx enough storage for 128 CD's at WAV quality !!!!!!!!!!). For those who don't know FLAC is identical to WAV - the only difference it uses a LOSSLESS compression algorithm whereas WAV is uncompressed. MP3's use a LOSSY compression algorithm which is why you will hear a lot of artifacts when using a decent set of headphones on say an mp3 track compressed at 128 kbs. Higher compression rates are usually not useable unless it's say purely speech like in an audio book.
Some technology won't make it because of other considerations --for example with USB 2 / USB 3 available everywhere as standard who uses or has even heard of firewire these days.
I'm sure as the price drops people will buy thesenew devices too. I'd certainly like to copy a full 1TB disk in a few mins if possible.
Just look at commercial servers -- these devices could SIGNIFICANTLY reduce backup or outage time --especially as cheaper RAID devices.
cheers
jimbo
Thanks to all who gave to this thread. It made for interesting reading. . .:)
Thunderbolt, although I preferred Light Peak actually, is likely to develop into the networking side of things at a future point - so not only can you have drives and video links on it, but your entire intranet.
Right now there's no LAN hardware, but it's early days. I can forsee fibre-optic replacing internal LAN wiring within the next decade all the same, and todays data rates are tiny compared to where it could lead.
Looks like WD is getting on the Thunderbolt wagon.
WD's MyBook takes a Thunderbolt to the chest ? The Register
Jim
Quote