Thunderbolt is basically useless.

[thezooloomaster]

I just realised, when browsing this useful page on wikipedia about the transfer rates of various devices, that in theory the average user cannot actually take advantage of the thunderbolt interface (which has a 1.25GB/s bit rate). It seems to me that unless you happen to have a (very expensive/ only useful for workstations) PCIe SSD then your SSD will be stuck with a 600MB/s transfer rate (SATA-600). In other words, the almost twice as high bit rate of thunderbolt would be wasted, and more poignantly, be in no way superior to USB 3.0.

Maybe I'm missing out on something here (buffers in system memory perhaps?), but when it comes to transferring large quantities of date it would seem there's no difference whether you use USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt.

I could be deeply mistaken. What do you think?

 

[willard]

Your analysis is based on the assumption that Thunderbolt is only used for copying data from a single drive. This is just silly.

Thunderbolt can:

1. Daisy chain devices
2. Copy to and from very fast RAID arrays
3. Drive displays
4. Drive external GPUs

And probably lots of other stuff I couldn't think of off the top of my head.

 

[CoolBOBob1]

Yeah Thunderbolt isn't really meant just to transfer data from a single ssd.

+1 to what willard said

 

[Guest]

Intel’s Thunderbolt press conference at Computex was an embarrassment of riches, only without the riches.

 

[thezooloomaster]

Your analysis is based on the assumption that Thunderbolt is only used for copying data from a single drive. This is just silly.

Thunderbolt can:

1. Daisy chain devices
2. Copy to and from very fast RAID arrays
3. Drive displays
4. Drive external GPUs

And probably lots of other stuff I couldn't think of off the top of my head.

Ok then, thanks for the information. Let's see if they actually start making more devices fitted with Thunderbolt.

 

[Pyree]

They are. There is the yet to release MSI GUS II and a new Vi-dock thunderbolt based eGPU enclosure. Available product include Sonnet expansion chassis and the Pegasus RAID HDD enclosure that use thunderbolt.

 

[willard]

Intel’s Thunderbolt press conference at Computex was an embarrassment of riches, only without the riches.

Let's hope that widespread availability on motherboards will fix the lack of devices.

I'd love to see Thunderbolt take off as the new USB, but it's looking more like Firewire to me

 

[Pyree]

There's rumor that thunderbolt will soon get the fibre optic so I guess may he everyone is hold off until then.