Finally Thunderbolt Hard Drives available

USB 3.0 for the PC or FireWire 800 for the Mac. Until you start purchasing RAID setups utilizing SSD drives, there is absolutely no reason to purchase mechanical hard drives in a Thunderbolt connectivity option.
 
I think "better" might not have been the correct word. Maybe "more economical" or "more widely available" or "1/2 the speed and 1/10 the functionality" but "better" is extremely subjective and only applicable in terms of price. If speed and extensibility are desired then Thunderbolt would be the "better". Also, even though we have not seen it yet, it is rumored USB 3.0 hubs with Thunderbolt connections will be coming.
 
You won't get any speed increase over USB3/FW800 with mechanical hard drives. Where Thunderbolt were really potentially shine for me will be in connecting graphics engines to your laptop. Imagine upgrading your MacBook Pro with an external Thunderbolt-connected NVIDIA CUDA card for times when you really need that capability. That should be possible with Thunderbolt from what I've heard.
 
Gary Huff said:
You won't get any speed increase over USB3/FW800 with mechanical hard drives. Where Thunderbolt were really potentially shine for me will be in connecting graphics engines to your laptop. Imagine upgrading your MacBook Pro with an external Thunderbolt-connected NVIDIA CUDA card for times when you really need that capability. That should be possible with Thunderbolt from what I've heard.
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This is where I expect Thunderbolt to really excel. In my video alter ego I am a visualist. If you have never watched a Mapping video or heard of Modul8 you should check it out. Currently the only way to have very fast drives and more then one projector, save the Matrox Triple Head2go, is a Mac Pro. Soon I hope to use my new Thunderbolt MacBook Pro. I love my Mac Pro but it is heavy and not easy to carry with me.


 
A German computer magazine was testing the new TB cables - it was bit disappointing.

In target disc mode they got:

Read 42.9 MBs
Write 20.9 MBs

They where able to get

Read 38,2
Write 36,1

over FW800 on the same machines though.

The discs where capable of 120 MBs read and write.

But at least you can keep your coffee hot on the TB plugs (50°C/122°F)

....just saying.

Frank
 
Gary Huff said:
You won't get any speed increase over USB3/FW800 with mechanical hard drives. Where Thunderbolt were really potentially shine for me will be in connecting graphics engines to your laptop. Imagine upgrading your MacBook Pro with an external Thunderbolt-connected NVIDIA CUDA card for times when you really need that capability. That should be possible with Thunderbolt from what I've heard.
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THAT is a tremendous idea. Imagine what this mean for Davinic Resolve users. It means no longer being tethered to a Mac Pro. You could theoretically do even the CUDA only operations like Noise Reduction in the new Resolve 8 on an iMac. Tell me more. Where did you hear about this?
 
yoclay, I haven't heard about this anywhere. I had read that Thunderbolt was so fast that you could actually uncouple the RAM from the mainboard and put it into a Thunderbolt device and there was literally no speed loss in communication with the CPU. If that's the case for system RAM, then doing the same with a graphics processor would be a walk in the park.

Imagine...your laptop uses a basic graphics chipset from Intel (low power, no switching) and when you need CUDA or the latest AMD offering for that fancy Valve-powered first-person-shooter, you plug int a little device about the size of those external Sound Blaster X-Fi addon cards and voila! you are now computing with power. Seems like a no-brainer (especially if you couple it with an external monitor where the raw data is sent over Thunderbolt to the graphics engine which immediately outputs it via the monitor connection instead of sending it back). That way, you could upgrade your graphics processor ON YOUR LAPTOP, which to me is immensely powerful. Obviously, the only drawback is that you'd have to have something hanging off of your laptop in the process, which means having it ideally sitting on a desk and not on your lap, but, in practice, I don't think it would be that much of a deal.

So no one's specifically talking about doing this exact thing yet, but if you can use Thunderbolt to connect system RAM to your system, then a GPU should be nothing at all.
 
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I've already seen guys using red rockets on mbp's via express card. I'm sure cuda over TB will be a reality very soon.
 
Gary Huff said:
You won't get any speed increase over USB3/FW800 with mechanical hard drives. Where Thunderbolt were really potentially shine for me will be in connecting graphics engines to your laptop. Imagine upgrading your MacBook Pro with an external Thunderbolt-connected NVIDIA CUDA card for times when you really need that capability. That should be possible with Thunderbolt from what I've heard.
Click to expand...

Why do people say this nonsense? I have a 2nd gen macbook pro, and a stack of external, non-raided, quad interface drives. If I run the drives on FW 800, I can't reliably stream 1 channel of 1080p24 ProRES video in FCP. If I run the SAME DRIVE on my Esata expresscard, I get at least 2 streams, no stuttering. I don't care what you think is the theoretical performance, that's proof enough for me that we need a faster external data standard.
 
Yup, that is odd. Prores will consistently stutter for me from firewire drives, but not at all from Esata. I assumed this was normal behavior, given prores's data transfer requirements. I also remember reading some issues with MBP's and FW 800 transfer rates, although I can't seem to recall them now.
 
I can get 50-70MB per second transfer on FW800, so you must be having an issue a connection somewhere along the line.
 
50-70MB is really poor performance for HD video editing. All the FW800 drives I've worked with stutter when you use more than one track of video with DVCPRO-HD. Also, what was the original the ProRes was made from? FW800 falls apart pretty quick for serious HD editing, honestly.

Tested the Promise Pegasus Thunderbolt RAID drive on a brand new MacBook Pro running FCP X and Lion (GM release) Yesterday.
Tests run with Quick Bench 4.
The tests used multiple files in each cycle ranging from 20 to 100 MB in size at 10 MB increments.
External FW800 drive tested on a MacPro 2x3.2 with no other FW devices connected.

* Internal eSATA 7200rpm drive maxed at 110MB/sec read, 99.5MB/sec write.
* Internal drive read/write speeds, with caching on, over 5 test cycles, varied a great deal.

* External OWC FW800 Mercury drive maxed at 60MB/sec read, 30MB/sec write, and took 4x as long to run 5 test cycles as the internal eSATA drive (both with cache on).
* External drive read/write speeds were the most consistent over the test cycles.

* Pegasus Thunderbolt external 4 bay in RAID 0 maxed at 867MB/sec read, 760MB/sec write.
* Pegasus RAID read/write speeds, with caching off, over 10 cycles, read speeds varied slightly, write speeds were dead on consistent, and ran 10 test cycles in 1/3 the time of the internal drive test.

I want one, if they weren't so expensive...
 
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