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Thunderbolt
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Jun 2009
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If i was to purchase the new MacBookPro with the Thunderbolt jack, and connect to an external hard drive via firewire 800. Isn't the transfer speed limited to the 800mb ?
The Thunderbolt speed is nice, but now we have to wait for all the hardware developers to implement Thunderbolt in their devices?
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I eat turtle soup for breakfast
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Los Angeles
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Yeah, if you connect using one of the older interfaces it won't magically be any faster.
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"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." TJ
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Jun 2009
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Ok. Are there any external devices that have this Thunderbolt built into it already?
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I eat turtle soup for breakfast
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Nov 1999
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Intel just announced it today. Part of their press conference was that Apple is first to the market with it.
Also, "Promise and LaCie will introduced devices in the "near future" as well as a statement from Western Digital for support. Other Media Connectivity & Creation partners: AJa, Apogee, Avid, Blackmagic, and Universal Audio."
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Jun 2001
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Yes, but expect all vendors only provide their top-of-the-line products to offer TB.
Which means, it's gonna be expensive in the beginning.
-t
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Nov 1999
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That's what Intel has said, yes.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Apr 2001
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I'm hoping for the obvious: Thunderbolt on the MacBook Air or a future Air-like MacBook Pro. I love everything about the Air except the lack of Gigabit ethernet (I'm not saying "it sucks" because of that...it's a specific feature I like having on my current MacBook), and Thunderbolt can seemingly adapt whatever extra feature a "pro" would want on a MBA.
Thunderbolt may be part of Jobs saying that the Air is the "future of MacBooks" in that it can be used to satisfy "pro" needs in a smaller notebook package thanks to its incredible connectivity.
Voch
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: BFE
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Originally Posted by Eden Aurora
Ok. Are there any external devices that have this Thunderbolt built into it already?
Just this.
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Jun 2009
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Will there be Thunderbolt cards for my MacPro? Do we have slots it could adapt to on the motherboard?
It would be upsetting to think that a portable has something so much better than a MacPro.
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I eat turtle soup for breakfast
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Down by the river
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Originally Posted by Eden Aurora
Will there be Thunderbolt cards for my MacPro? Do we have slots it could adapt to on the motherboard?
It would be upsetting to think that a portable has something so much better than a MacPro.
No. Intel said in order to upgrade an old computer to ThunderBolt you'd need to replace the motherboard (e.g. buy a new Mac).
BTW, I'm surprised Intel and Apple couldn't come up with a better name than "ThunderBolt"...
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Oct 2001
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Originally Posted by cgc
BTW, I'm surprised Intel and Apple couldn't come up with a better name than "ThunderBolt"...
LightningBolt?
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I'm a bird. I am the 1% (of pets).
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Dec 2000
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You could get a Thunderbolt-to-eSATA adapter and use it with an eSATA enclosure. eSATA is significantly faster than FW800, and faster than the max speeds of all currently available hard drives (not SSDs, though).
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Mar 2003
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Originally Posted by CharlesS
You could get a Thunderbolt-to-eSATA adapter and use it with an eSATA enclosure. eSATA is significantly faster than FW800, and faster than the max speeds of all currently available hard drives (not SSDs, though).
Unless you're using an SSD, eSata is only marginally faster than FW800 (e.g. 80MBps vs 70MBps).
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Dec 2000
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Not sure where you got those numbers, but eSATA's theoretical limit is 3 Gb/s, or 375 MB/s, and eSATA Rev. 3.0 is coming out soon, with speeds of 6 Gb/s, or 750 MB/s. FireWire's theoretical limit is 800 Mb/s, or 100 MB/s.
Sure, the real-world speeds will be lower than theoretical, but with a theoretical top speed anywhere from 4x to 7.5x that of FireWire's, eSATA is going to come out on top no matter what you do. At any rate, it will be far faster than the maximum speed of any spinning hard drive, so you're not going to see any performance disadvantages to going eSATA (and besides, eSATA enclosures are far cheaper than FW800 ones).
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Moderator
Join Date: Apr 2000
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
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The main reason that eSATA is faster than FW800 in real world tests is the latency added by the FW800-SATA bridge. A Thunderbolt connection would need a Thunderbolt-SATA bridge instead. There are good reasons to believe that this bridge would add much less latency, but we don't know until we see one in action.
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The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Dec 2000
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Thunderbolt is PCI-Express, so the latency should be similar to that added by a SATA PCIe card. Which is to say, not much.
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hayesk
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Originally Posted by Big Mac
Yeah, if you connect using one of the older interfaces it won't magically be any faster.
If you connect two or more however…
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Jun 2009
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I eat turtle soup for breakfast
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Nov 1999
Location: 888500128, C3, 2nd soft.
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Originally Posted by Eden Aurora
man, i feel screwed.
Um…
Why?
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Los Angeles
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It sounds like Eden has a substantial investment in FIrewire peripherals and thought they would somehow increase in speed naturally with the advent of Thunderbolt.
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"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." TJ
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Dec 2000
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Even with legacy peripherals you can see an improvement from Thunderbolt. For example, if you use adapters to connect your USB and FireWire devices, you can get more than one adapter and have multiple buses for a given port, thus cutting down on the competition between devices. Heck, since Thunderbolt is PCIe and there already exist PCIe cards with multiple USB or FireWire ports, we might get adapters with a few USB/FireWire buses just on the one device.
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Jan 2000
Location: Stoneham, MA, USA
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I have my hopes up high that one day, someone will make a thunderbolt bridgeboard that has all sorts of SATA connectors on it. 5-bay thunderbolt hard drive towers will be great for the more "professional" setups. But at home, where we like to hack things together, my current firewire/sata combo mangled up tower filled with bridge boards could be replaced by one bridge board with all 6 hard drives plugged directly into it. And I could replace my older mac mini server with a current one for this to plug into (well not current, current when new ones come out that have thunderbolt). That would be an awesome setup.
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Senior User
Join Date: Apr 2002
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Originally Posted by l008com
I have my hopes up high that one day, someone will make a thunderbolt bridgeboard that has all sorts of SATA connectors on it...
You can always put PCIe ESATA cards into an expansion chassis such as the Echo Express from Sonnet. Most of the cards are x4 PCIe, so you shouldn't see any degradation in performance as compared to putting the card directly into a Mac Pro, for instance.
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Jan 2000
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That's an interesting idea. But it will probably be much more pricey going that route. One way to simplify the whole setup would be to just buy one of those 8-bay thunderbolt towers that Sonnet also makes. But that's probably not the most cost-effective way to go.
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