Jim George wrote:
If my drives cannot keep up, what is the point of having thunderbolt?
Well it's like this for all new interfaces, someone has to start it and later on someone makes faster storage to take advantage of it if it's on enough machines a market develops.
Right now it's not a benefit, but perhaps later on it will if significant break throughs in storage speed occur.
If my MB Pro has thunderbolt shouldnt it be able to keep up with the speed of the external?
Thunderbolt is like a perfect straight and smooth highway with two fast lanes and no other vehicles on it, allowing for vehicles to travel at say 1000 MPH in either direction easily.
Your present storage drive in your computer and your external drive are like two horse drawn carriages on that highway. 🙂
You likely could upgrade both internal and external to SSD and it would be like a couple of tractor trailer trucks going across the highway at 100 MPH, still there is a 900 MPH more potential to go, also you need to have something in those two tractor trailers to carry in order to bother with it.
In other words, if you were constantly transferring a very huge amount of data regularly then two large 500 SSD drives would make that transfer over Thunderbolt done in a few minutes instead of a hour via horse drawn carriage.
How many times a day or a week or month or even a year do people need to transfer 500GB of data to take advantage of that extereme speed?
Anyway SSD's wear out prematurely if you do that.
So the "sense" in Thunderbolt is it doesn't make any present sense for most common storage drives, just for monitors now it appears and perhaps between two large RAID 5 sets (like 20 semi's on the highway)
Of course Apple ditched it's XRAID years ago which could have taken advantage of Thunderbolt.
I think the "sense" in Thunderbolt is more about kissing Intels arse than anything practical.
Intel controls the procesors, the integrated graphics on most Mac's, the EFI firmware and now the Thunderbolt interface between Mac's and monitors, pretty soon all that will be left of Apple is a shell name musch like it is now for Hitachi branded drives as they are now owned by Western Digitial.