Thunderbolt Reviews

Thunderbolt Reviews

All things Thunderbolt

Thunderbolt Reviews - All things Thunderbolt

Drobo Thunderbolt storage devices – Finally!

You would be forgiven for thinking that it would have happened sooner, given that the Drobo devices have been so popular with Apple users in general. There are many creative professionals already using Drobo raid storage devices for working with video and high-end photography. Seeing as so many creative professionals prefer to use Macintosh computers, just by joining the dots together you would expect Drobo to have a range of Thunderbolt storage devices available pretty quickly. Data Robotics, Drobo finally announced there will be a Thunderbolt raid Drobo style.

Thunderbolt storage devices – Drobo review

Drobo have announced the Drobo 5D and the Drobo Mini in a June Drobo 2012 event. With the same BeyondRAID technology that gives you single or dual drive redundancy and the ability to add or hot swap drives in the event of hard drive failures. I have one of the pre Thunderbolt storage devices and it has worked extremely well for protecting my important data files. It can only be a good thing to finally have Drobo and Thunderbolt technology available in the same device.


free applications

iMage Tools
The new Drobo Thunderbolt storage devices are available with two Thunderbolt ports making it possible to daisychain up to 6 Thunderbolt supported devices. You could easily have two or three Drobo Thunderbolt storage devices linked to your computer through the Apple Thunderbolt cable as well as an Apple Thunderbolt display. Why not even add the Belkin Thunderbolt device into the daisychain also. Interestingly, with the Drobo 5D you also have the USB 3 available as extra connectivity. Maybe Drobo are hedging their bets by adding USB 3 and expanding their market into the PC end of things too.

Faster and faster Thunderbolt raid Drobo

In the same way that you can buy hard drives that have some solid state memory, you can add high-performance flash to accelerate performance of the Drobo storage array. It is a new industry standard mSATA SSD that will accelerate performance of the Drobo Thunderbolt storage devices. This extra memory is also there to give extra protection for the data as it is passed through to the magnetic disk-based drives.

Drobo thunderbolt storage devices

Thunderbolt raid Drobo is battery protected

If the power to the drive is suddenly cut, there is a battery which will keep the Drobo alive long enough for data to be written to non-volatile storage. This is extremely important for making sure your vital data is kept completely safe. The battery has been designed to recharge itself and last for the lifetime of the Drobo Thunderbolt storage device.

When is Drobo coming out with Thunderbolt device?

Drobo users will be delighted to hear that there will be a Drobo with a Thunderbolt port available for sale in July of 2012. There are two new Drobo Thunderbolt storage devices, the Drobo 5D and the interesting looking Drobo Mini. The Drobo Mini will take two and a half inch drives and is more of a portable design. I can see that these will be incredibly popular with Mac users that have bought the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display. The two and half inch drives could even be solid state devices giving you a Drobo Thunderbolt SSD. A Drobo Thunderbolt hard drive in this configuration would be screamingly fast. This would be perfect for a video editor working on the road, making video magical creations. Add a Black Magic Thunderbolt Intensity Extreme and things are looking very good indeed for Drobo Thunderbolt 2012.

Seagate 3 TB Goflex desk Thunderbolt hard drive

It is about time that we had available some single drive Thunderbolt hard disks available for our Macs. Seagate, the well-known hard drive maker here are giving us a 3 TB hard drive that we can connect using Thunderbolt. The cost of the drive from the Apple stories $409 and obviously is more expensive than you would pay for hard drive that is not Thunderbolt enabled. For certain types of work on your computer, your MacBook Pro or your iMac, the Thunderbolt speed is going to be well worth getting. So the price to buy the drive isn’t quite so bad, especially when you consider that the Thunderbolt cable is included also. Cheaper than having to go high end like with a Pegasus Raid Thunderbolt drive.

Thunderbolt drive also good for backup

With this GoFlex desk Thunderbolt adapter drive from Seagate you get 10 Gb per second file transfer speeds. This drive will also work with other adapters and maybe you already have the same drive with a FireWire adapter. It would be interesting to see how much the FireWire adapter costs in comparison. FireWire 800 is pretty fast, but Thunderbolt file transfer speeds are much faster.

Goflex desk Thunderbolt – Formatted as a Mac drive but can be interchanged with a PC

There is a downloadable HFS plus driver available for the PC that will allow you to connect up to a Windows PC if absolutely necessary. Certainly there could be times when you need to get some files from somebody that you are collaborating with that only has a poor Windows PC.

Backup your files with a Thunderbolt hard drive

This Seagate GoFlex Desk adapter external Mac hard drive is fully compatible with Time Machine. Even though this Thunderbolt hard drive might be compatible with Time Machine, I’m sure I could think of much better uses for it. I would be more likely to use this drive as a scratch disk for working with Final Cut Pro.

Seagate 3 TB GoFlex for Mac review

GoFlex desk 3TB Review

The drive is very easy to set up and you can use the line disk utility to partition it. You might perhaps set it up so that you have 2 TB for Time Machine and 1 TB for the scratch disk. The drive is compact and quiet and doesn’t run too hot. It seemed the a pretty robust drive and looks like it much work it will last a good long time. It does come with a three-year warranty and will probably last longer than that. You will be able to plug it in to your Apple Thunderbolt cinema display or directly into your Mac. GoFlex desk for Mac Review from Mac20Q.

Apple Fan Boys are asking if Thunderbolt fast data transfer will ever gain momentum

Thunderbolt fast data transfer at CES

January is the time of year for the international consumer Electronics show which takes place in Nevada USA. It was expected that there would be some news of new Thunderbolt peripherals that would possibly be soon coming and made available to consumers. The Apple fans that have a Macbook Air are looking for perhaps a MacBook Air dock. A dock would be very handy so that users could use just one cable to have everything connected to the MacBook Air. It would save a lot of time and effort with plugging in and unplugging, especially if you are coming and going quite a lot with your ultra portable Mac computer.

Videographers Delight Thunderbolt Black Magic Intensity Extreme Thunderbolt fast data transfer

To a certain extent the 27 inch Apple Thunderbolt is a MacBook Air docking station. On the large monitor from Apple with the Thunderbolt fast data transfer, there is just about everything you would need apart from Thunderbolt to HDMI and the specialist connections that you might find in a Black Magic Intensity Extreme Thunderbolt peripheral. The only thing with the 27 inch monitor with Thunderbolt from Apple that is a deal breaker for many, is the price. It is rather expensive and you and I, like many other Apple fans really want to see some affordable Thunderbolt peripherals.


Thunderbolt fast data transfer

What we want are those Thunderbolt devices that we can use to connect our older kit to, as well as having the ports and connectivity with new Thunderbolt peripherals and in particular Thunderbolt hard drives. There must be something weird happening and to do with the licensing money required by either Apple or Intel, that is making the technology to expensive to get put into the PC hardware. We do need to see the PC manufacturers spearheading a take-up of the Thunderbolt fast data transfer technology on the latest Intel motherboards, so that there will be the effect of economy of scale, bringing down the prices to an affordable level.

The GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter from Seagate

The hard drive manufacturer Seagate have come up with a device which will be an adapter for the hard drives that they have already. This is following on from the adapters they have made which allow those drives to be connected via either USB 3 or FireWire 800. This Thunderbolt adapter will allow a standard USB externally connected hard drive to be connected to a Thunderbolt port. I have to wonder if this sort of adapter, which looks as though it may be a little bit pricey, will give sufficient bang for the buck because they are not fully Thunderbolt. I suspect that these drives that are going to make use of the Thunderbolt specs will not be able to take the full advantage of the Thunderbolt data transfer speed. There could still be uses for this type of drive and there could be data transfer speed improvements that may be worth having, even though it may not be quite as good as having a Thunderbolt harddrive device that is designed around the proper Thunderbolt specs.

Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock

Belkin usually come up with affordable devices for us computer users, but the Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock which was announced at CES, January 2012, also looks like it could be too expensive for many users. On the other hand for a computer user that really needs to make use of the faster Thunderbolt data transfer, it could be just what the doctor ordered. In as much as, you will not have the heart attack that would certainly affect you by getting out the wallet to buy the very expensive 27 inch Thunderbolt monitor from Apple.

Belkin Thunderbolt adapter

Does Apple really want the Thunderbolt fast data transfer interface to succeed

Just throwing the Thunderbolt port onto all of the new Apple computers during 2011, has proved so far, to not be enough push for the industry to make the Thunderbolt peripherals and Thunderbolt devices that should have arrived already. That is despite the power that Apple now has, by being one of the biggest manufacturers of computers both in the USA and worldwide. There are Apple fan boys that are asking the question, will we ever see sufficient take-up of this data transfer technology. Will the Thunderbolt specs properly get used in Thunderbolt hard drives at a price that we can afford to connect to our Thunderbolt enabled Mac Mini?

Wanted – iMac SSD drive – Or Thunderbolt external hard drive

What do you do? iMac SSD or wait for a good Thunderbolt drive?

I fairly recently bought myself a new 27 inch iMac with Thunderbolt ports. Yes that’s right, the iMac 27 inch has two Thunderbolt ports, how cool is that?. I was really tempted, and there would have been no such thing as temptation, but a certain purchase if I had sufficient the cash to have an iMac SSD drive included. Everybody knows that if you use an SSD drive as your main drive and then have your secondary drive is a normal hard drive spindle drive, of the mechanical type, then you will get blisteringly fast usage out of your computer. The only fly in the ointment is the fact that the iMac SSD drive when you buy it as an optional extra, is incredibly expensive. So that is why the Thunderbolt external hard drive will be what people will buy first.

Thunderbolt external hard drive

Thunderbolt hard drive device with SSD

For those of us that have had to make a decision, not to go to and buy the Apple SSD drive, we might think that a solution would be to add an SSD drive internally a year later, when we have more money available. It sounds like a good plan, because one year later or two years later, it would be like having a new computer. Another good thing that we could possibly expect, would be that the price of the SSD drives would be cheaper in the future. At the moment if you want to add a 256 GB solid-state drive to the standard iMac, then you would be adding $600 to the price of your computer. I know somebody that did buy the iMac with this configuration and she is completely delighted with the computer that she has. She says that the iMac SSD drive version is a very speedy indeed.

What else can be done to make an iMac faster

The option I took after buying the iMac was to buy an extra 8 GB of RAM and install it so that now I have 12 GB of RAM available. I was surprised that I was able to add to the RAM to the memory I already had in the computer. I expected to have to take out what was in, to put in the new third-party RAM. In this latest version of the iMac the 27 inch version, instead of there only being two slots for RAM there are now four. So although I could not afford the iMac SSD drive, I was able to speed up my iMac by quite a large amount just with using extra RAM memory. I still like the idea though, of adding an SSD drive at a later stage. Maybe it will be possible to do that and asked Apple to do it under AppleCare. You never know may be they will not be charging quite so much for a 256 GB SSD drive in a year or so. And pigs might fly!

Thunderbolt external hard drive – Mechanical and SSD

There could be a small problem with adding an SSD drive, as I have heard that the third-party iMac SSD drives are not quite the same as the Apple drives. It is something to do with the temperature sensors or the connectors that stop you from adding third-party drives. It is possible that a company like Other World Computing might come up with a compatible drive later. For that to happen, we might just have to keep our fingers crossed.

Thunderbolt iMac SSD Drive to the rescue.

This is where Thunderbolt comes in. Because of how Thunderbolt is electronically connected to the motherboard of the iMac to facilitate the speedy data transfer, then it is possible that an external Thunderbolt iMac SSD drive could be used as the main drive on the iMac. I believe it is possible to boot from a Thunderbolt external drive, so all that would be necessary would be to install the OS X system and the applications on the Thunderbolt external hard drive. With such an iMac SSD drive configuration via Thunderbolt instead of the SSD drive being internal, then once again it could be possible to have a very fast Apple iMac computer. All we have to do now is to wait for a reasonably priced external hard drive enclosure that has a Thunderbolt port included. It could also have USB 3 and FireWire on the same enclosure, just to make it versatile in terms of how it could be connected. Using Thunderbolt in this way is what I have planned because it would greatly improve the experience with using Final Cut Pro X on the iMac.

Using Thunderbolt and an Expresscard Docking Connector for Fast Data transfer

Sonnet expresscard 2

Sonnet ExpressCard/34 docking connector

Sonnet Echo express card is a new Thunderbolt device which expands your computer’s connectivity and capabilities. Thunderbolt dock review - What that comes down to, is that you can plug one of these in using a Thunderbolt cable and then choose whichever Express Card/34 adapter that you want to use. You can buy the Sonnet express card adapters, but there are also other manufacturers that make the express cards. I would expect them to work in a industry standard docking connector. This dock connector from Sonnet supports the CompactFlash and SDXC readers, gigabit ethernet, USB 3 and some of the eSata adapters and of course it will connect with FireWire.

Limitations of the Sonnet docking connector device

Thunderbolt dock connectors Thunderbolt Adapter

Even though this is not going to be a terribly cheap way of connecting your present technology or even your future technology to your Mac via Thunderbolt, initially it could work out cheaper than using the Apple dock connector for Thunderbolt which is the Apple Thunderbolt Cinema Display. There is only one express card slot in this device, which is severely limiting to the number of things that you can connect to your Thunderbolt enabled Mac computer at any one time. At least if you get the Apple Thunderbolt Cinema display you have a number of USB connections, FireWire, gigabit ethernet and also another Thunderbolt port, so that you can continue the Thunderbolt daisy chain. I am surprised to find that this Sonnet Echo express card Thunderbolt adapter has only one Thunderbolt port. This means that it can only be connected at the end of a Thunderbolt chain.

The Sonnet Echo express card docking device, does take advantage of the fast interface that you get with Thunderbolt. You get 10 GB per second data transfer, but you have to remember that the bottleneck will be the speed of the express card adapter at 5 GB per second. The device that you are connecting into this adapter will also rule the data speed, so that if you are using FireWire 800 then the maximum speed you’ll get is whatever FireWire is capable of.

Costs of the dock connectors

It seems that this solution for transferring data using the Thunderbolt connection on the Mac, is going to be more suited to users that already have some of these express cards. So if you buy yourself a new Mac that doesn’t have an express card slot, but does have the Thunderbolt port and you don’t want to pay for the Apple Thunderbolt Cinema display, then this could be a decent enough solution. The product doesn’t come included with a Apple connector Thunderbolt cable, so you will have to go and buy the Apple Thunderbolt cable, which as we know is a little bit pricey to connect your dock for Thunderbolt.

Thunderbolt dock adaptorApple Thunderbolt cable at $50, it does make it quite an expensive card reader. Unless you have a specific need for connecting a device via express card, and you need it now, then you may be better to wait a little while longer. I expect in time there will be cheaper better solutions for connecting our devices via Thunderbolt.

Rarer than Rocking Horse Poo – Thunderbolt Devices For Our Macs

Thunderbolt devices why are we waiting oh! Why are we waiting!

On the one hand you have people saying things like – Holy Crap… PATIENCE people! It takes time for the manufacturers to get on board with the new technology from Apple and Intel. It takes time for the third-party manufacturers to get in there and adapt to the new, faster and shinier. Just look back to when FireWire first came out with the G3 Macs and nobody had any idea one that was for. We know now that Apple developed and invented it and now all the Mac users and even one or two PC users depend upon FireWire technology. At this stage if we give it a few more months it will be a year since the Thunderbolt ports were introduced into the latest Macs and still no consumer level Thunderbolt devices.


LaCie releases Thunderbolt HDD SSD boxes thunderbolt devices

We do have one or two Thunderbolt devices

On the other hand we have a number of people that are complaining that it is all very well for those people that want to have an expensive full Raid system, like the Promise Pegasus R4. When what I want is a simple but fast enclosure that will hold one hard drive. And I want one that is only just a little bit more expensive than an external drive that has FireWire as its input and output technology. I can go and buy a $50 Thunderbolt cable from Apple, I can even get the rather expensive but totally lovely, Apple Thunderbolt Cinema display. There are also one or two Thunderbolt devices that are in the stage of promised to us, as in, announced but have yet to see the light of day. Come on guys, I have a wad of cash in my pocket, burning a hole waiting for a Thunderbolt HDD.

It can depend upon your computer usage as to why you are looking for Thunderbolt devices in these early days of this new speedy technology. I know that there are many users of the new Final Cut Pro X that are enjoying the new 64-bit goodness of that software, that would like to be able to also increase the data transfer between the scratch disk they are using for the video. With the fact that the Final Cut Pro X is so much cheaper than the old Final Cut version, there are many more users doing video, possibly. When you are working with video the extra speed that could be got from fast Thunderbolt devices would be most welcome.Mind you, the Lacie Little Big Disk is a bit too pricey just yet.

Why the raid Thunderbolt devices are first

I would imagine that it is quite likely, that many users in the market for a fast drive at the moment are perhaps holding off, with the new Thunderbolt devices being imminent. Many of us Apple geeks that are aware that the speed bump might not be as big as we would like it to be though. The hard drives drives are going to be a bottleneck when put into the Thunderbolt external hard drive cases. That is probably why the Raid drives are the first ones coming out because it is the Raid zero technology, that is able to keep up with the full speed of the Thunderbolt data transfer rates.

Thunderbolt technology taking off slowly

Well it certainly looks like the keyword is patience even though things are finally starting to happen. In September there was news that Matrox have started to put Thunderbolt on their video cards and that G-tech also now have a Thunderbolt Raid solution. So there is truth in the formula that Apple uses, which is – Build it and they will come. I’m sure that as early adopters we can wait a little bit longer and make do with the FireWire 800 until we see the good and fast Thunderbolt devices hit the market. So lets be patient.

Videographers Delight – Thunderbolt Black Magic Intensity Extreme

The Black Magic Thunderbolt Intensity Extreme Video Capture Unit

It is great to see that there are some Thunderbolt enabled devices being announced now, although mostly in the high-end range of computer using. We should be up to see the Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock, which is likely to be priced for us mere mortals to be able to afford. A device that is announced from Black Magic and will be available in the stores to buy, in the last part of 2011, is the Black Magic Intensity Extreme.

Black Magic Intensity Extreme

The Black Magic Intensity Extreme is a video capture device that will capture from a number of different interfaces. It has a breakout port into which you can bring in video and audio, through a number of different connections. It has an HDMI inputs and a HDMI output, which I could use with my Canon video camera which as a HDMI out. I could use the device to capture video directly from the camera to bring in and use with Final Cut Pro 10. Professional videographers will be delighted with the fast speed available by connecting through HDMI and Thunderbolt to the Black Magic Intensity Extreme, as it will be much faster than using FireWire.



The Intensity Extreme is unique in being able to combine the HDMI capture facilities and playback, along with the analogue component of NTSC, PAL, S-Video, as well as the analogue video and audio capture. The box will look great next to your Thunderbolt Mac Mini as it is created from a solid block of aluminium, the same type of manufacture as found with the MacBook Pro.

Black Magic Intensity Extreme

Thunderbolt Black Magic Intensity Extreme

The Intensity Extreme device gets it power through the computer Thunderbolt connection, so this makes it excellent for a videographer, working out in the field shooting video and editing it. This sort of workflow of editing out in the field, certainly speeds up the process of electronic news gathering.

When you are using the HDMI input port to capture video from an unprotected HDMI video source, you will find there is also a HDMI output port, that you can use for editor monitoring. While you are working within Final Cut Pro X you can output to a large screen television through the HDMI out port. You will be able to see how it looks on a large TV as well as on the Thunderbolt Apple Display. For getting better quality from a camera in the form of proper uncompressed video, the Black Magic device will bypass the high-definition camera video compression chip and take the video directly from the camera image sensor.

Great for Videographers – Black Magic Intensity Extreme with Thunderbolt

While the Black Magic Intensity Extreme has the benefits of the small size, good power efficiency, high quality, videographers will notice more the fact that it can switch directly between 1080, 720 and the video types of NTSC and PAL. It will work with the QuickTime software as well as with Adobe premiere, After-Effects and Photoshop.

Finally, it has to be noted that the Black Magic Thunderbolt Intensity Extreme comes at an amazingly affordable price of just under $300. I am extremely keen to be able try one of these intense of the extreme devices for myself.

Thunderbolt Intensity Extreme

Thunderbolt Apple Display And What You Can Connect It To

Limitations Of The Thunderbolt Apple Display

The Thunderbolt Apple display and all of its 27 inches of Cinema display goodness, does have a few limitations, mostly depending upon the Apple computer device you connect it to. Mainly in terms of the number of displays, that you can connect to the computer and largely dependent upon the video graphics card that it will be connected to.

The Amazing iPad

For example with a 13 inch MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt, you can connect two Thunderbolt Apple display monitors, but when you do this the internal display will go blank. Obviously the video graphics card within the 13 inch MacBook Pro will not run two monitors simultaneously. With the 15 inch MacBook Pro you can add those two extra Thunderbolt Apple display monitors and the internal monitor of the MacBook will still be working.



Mac Mini with Thunderbolt Apple Display and HDMI too

The iMac 27 inch, which is the one that I have, available from mid-2011, will support two Thunderbolt Apple display monitors and it doesn’t matter which of the two Thunderbolt ports the displays are connected to. The Mac mini that has the AMD graphics is able to support an HDMI device, such as a television, as well as using two Thunderbolt Apple displays.

If you have a look at the Apple support document for the Apple Thunderbolt display(27 inch), there is a table which states the number of Thunderbolt Apple display monitors each computer model can support. The MacBook Air with Thunderbolt, MacBook Pro 13 inch, Mac mini 2.3 GHz and the Mac mini with Lion server are all rated for only one Thunderbolt display.

Thunderbolt Apple Display

Two Thunderbolt displays are possible with the Thunderbolt enabled Mac computers that have the AMD Radeon graphics cards. This includes the MacBook Pro of the 15 inch and 17 inch varieties, the iMac and the Thunderbolt Mac Mini 2.5 GHz. With this information you can see why the Mac mini is popular as a computer suitable for editing video. If you have the faster of the two Mac mini models you can have the two Thunderbolt Apple display monitors and still connect an HDMI compatible device. With such a computer and Thunderbolt Apple display set up, it would be like sitting on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. “Beam me up Scottie”.

Thunderbolt Apple Display and the older Mini display port monitors

If you have the older version of the Apple Cinema Display that has the mini display port, then you will find that it will not work if you connected into the rear of the Thunderbolt Apple display 27 inch. Those older displays have to be connected directly to the Thunderbolt port on the Thunderbolt enabled Mac computer. It is possible though to connect a mini port display to different Thunderbolt peripherals, other than the Thunderbolt Apple display, but it would need to be at the end of the Thunderbolt chain.

The limitations that you will find with the Thunderbolt Apple display are understandable and sensible and only down to the limitations of the graphics cards within the various Mac computers. It is possible though, that somebody could try one of these things that would lead to having a blank display on the main computer and think that they had been cheated in some way. Really this will not necessarily be a problem, if you either do your research before you buy one of these, quite expensive, Thunderbolt Apple display monitors to add to your setup. In any case if you did have a problem, then being able to return one of the Thunderbolt Apple display devices back to Apple, would not be a problem if you do this within 14 days of the purchase.

The Amazing iPad

Using Thunderbolt Peripherals – Expansion with the Magma ExpressBox 3T

New PCIe 2.0 Thunderbolt Peripherals From Magma

When I started looking into the possibilities of all the Thunderbolt peripherals, that we could have, this product actually come to mind for me. But with the fact that the iMac is now so powerful and is getting to the stage where, one would not consider buying the Mac Pro, this Magma breakout box, makes a lot of sense. With the Magma ExpressBox 3T, you have 3 PCI expansion slots that will give you lightning fast connection through your Thunderbolt Port. This is going to be extremely interesting to the video professionals, that are looking to extend their iMac computer, with various top of the market PCI express cards.



Magma call this an ‘outside of the box’ solution, for using PCI cards with Thunderbolt equipped computers. Plug-in one of these Thunderbolts expansion breakout boxes and then you have a place that you can put in a PCIe card for high end video capture, media transcoding, audio processing. It goes without saying that already with Thunderbolt Peripherals, you will have fast data storage. That is a given, when you have Thunderbolt available on your computer.
Thunderbolt peripherals

Thunderbolt Peripherals for the iMac

We already have one breakout box for Thunderbolt in the form of the Thunderbolt Apple Cinema display. With just one cable running from your computer to the Apple Cinema Display, you have FireWire and USB connections alongside a stunning display. The Magma ExpressBox 3T on the other hand takes this a stage further, in that you have three spaces available in the expansions chassis and you can put in whatever PCIe cards you like.

This Magma ExpressBox, has the 3 PCIe 2 slots contained within a anodised case that looks quite sleek. It is made for transportation and mobile computing, for video professionals and even comes with its own travel bag, so that you can move it from place to place easily. If you’re going to have one of these expansion box Thunderbolt peripherals next to your beloved Mac computer, then it’s got to look good.

More Thunderbolt Peripherals to Enhance Your Computing Power

Magma tell us that they are working with development partners, Apple included, such as Avid, Red the camera makers and Promise Technology. By working with these other development partners, they expect to be able to increase the usefulness of the ExpressBox 3T. Magma also make other expansion systems for servers, desktop computers and portable computers, but this is the first product that takes advantage of the Thunderbolt technology. I am not a video professional, no real need for one of these Magma three slot expansion chassis devices, but I want one anyway. There is always room on my desk for shiny tech toys. I expect it will be possible to buy one of these Magma ExpressBox 3T, Thunderbolt devices from the Apple online store, quite soon.

Not the Thunderbolt Review of the Little Big Disk by Lacie

Not the Lacie Thunderbolt Review

Lacie promise Thunderbolt – Well it is September and the summer is almost over, although you wouldn’t know it where I live, it’s dreadfully hot outside. According to the information on the Lacie hard drives website, the Lacie Little big disk will be available in summer 2011. I don’t think it’s going to be a good idea to hold my breath, while I am waiting, to be able to do a Thunderbolt review for the Thunderbolt enabled Little Big Disk.
Apple Thunderbolt cableLaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt
When this product does arrive and is available to do a Thunderbolt review, I can tell you now, that the price of it is going to be high. Just have a look in the Apple Store and for the little big disk, without the Thunderbolt is costing an arm and a leg. There must be something very special about the Lacie hard drive, and it must be more than the fancy design of the case, because the price is about two or three times the cost of any other drive. Have to wonder about the Lacie Thunderbolt price.



Coming Soon – Thunderbolt Review of Little Big Disk

When the Lacie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt drive does arrive, it will have inside it two 250 GB solid-state disk drives inside, which will be very good for the speed of data transfer. Using SSD drives is also excellent if you want to have a desk that is free of the vibration, that is found in the mechanical drives. In a Thunderbolt review of the Lacie drive we will be able to comment on the striped Raid set, which is the preconfigured set up for the drives, giving the enhanced performance you would expect, from an expensive hard drive. Connecting it up to the Thunderbolt Mac Mini will be fun.

Expect a Thunderbolt Review for Video Editors

It is expected that a Thunderbolt drive like the Lacie Little Big Disk, will show us in a Thunderbolt review, have excellent it will be for video journalists and photographers working on a story out in the field. While covering a story in a remote area, a journalist will be able to download footage directly to a MacBook Pro, with the little big disk connected via Thunderbolt technology. This could cut down the time that it takes to be able to get a story worked up to a finished form, to be able to be distributed to the TV network.
Thunderbolt Lacie - Thunderbolt review

Daisy chaining of the Thunderbolt Lacie HDD

In Thunderbolt reviews, with a number of these Lacie, Little big disk Thunderbolt and drives, it will be possible to see how easy it is to daisy chain them together to provide sufficient hard drive space. This will be using the , which provides the two channels providing up to 10 GB per 2nd in both directions. With this one single cable, a video editor could be digitising high-definition video, at the same time as viewing high-resolution images on a Thunderbolt Cinema display.

A Promise is all we have for now!

Look out for a Thunderbolt review of the Lacie Little Big Disk as soon as the product becomes available in the Apple online web store. For the moment all that we have available in Thunderbolt hard drive space, is the Raid array from promise technologies. We can wait a wee bit longer for some Lacie Storage of the Thunderbolt variety.