Thunderbolt
Despite being introduced almost a year ago on Apple’s MacBook Pro lineup, the Thunderbolt interface hasn’t really seen as much love from peripheral makers as we would have expected. While there have been a few Thunderbolt-equipped peripherals hitting the market, it’s been more of a trickle than a flood. Belkin is no doubt also hoping the range of Thunderbolt devices will increase in the near future to make it’s upcoming Thunderbolt Express Dock, which was unveiled today at CES, a more compelling purchase. Read More
LaCie has finally joined the Thunderbolt club with the release of its Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series. Announced earlier this year, the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt is available in 1 TB (7200RPM) and 2 TB (5400 RPM) HDD configurations at a price of US$399 and $499 respectively. There's also a 240 GB SSD model on the way but pricing is yet to be confirmed. Read More
The flow of Thunderbolt peripherals onto the market definitely seems to be building steam with this latest example from Sonnet bringing expanded connectivity options to those with machines packing Apple's new I/O technology. Sonnet's US$150 EchoExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt Adapter uses a PCIe interface to link a range of existing peripherals such as USB 3.0, FireWire 800, eSATA, Gigabit Ethernet and high speed memory cards through a single Thunderbolt port. Read More
Thunderbolt definitely seems to be gaining momentum with another peripheral for the high-speed interface rearing its head. Spotted by DailyTech at this week's 2011 Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco, the Thunderbolt Express Dock from Belkin connects with a Thunderbolt-equipped Mac to provide the same docking station capabilities found on Apple's recently announced Apple Thunderbolt Display (but without the 27-inch monitor). Read More
Aside from moving around large backup files in a spritely fashion, one of the areas most likely to benefit from the new Thunderbolt interface is video editing. Which is why it's not all that surprising to see that one of the first Thunderbolt-equipped peripherals to appear following a number of external HDDs that have started to trickle onto the market is the EUR209 Intensity Extreme video capture and playback device. The unit from Blackmagic Design offers 10-bit HDMI and analog video editing in SD and HD, with its 10 Gb/s Thunderbolt port providing data transfer speeds up to 20 times faster than USB 2.0 and up to 11.5 times faster than FireWire 800. Read More
Seagate and Hitachi GST unveil 4TB external hard drives
On Wednesday, Seagate announced it was shipping the world’s first 4TB external hard drive in the form of the 4TB GoFlex Desk Drive, which offers a high speed USB 3.0 interface. Obviously looking to steal a bit of Seagate’s thunder – or should that be Thunderbolt – the very next day Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) demoed its own 4TB external hard drives at IBC 2011 in Amsterdam in a two-drive, 8TB, RAID 0, G-RAID unit with Thunderbolt, FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 ports. Read More
Just in case the release of OSX Lion and the unveiling of the updated MacBook Air isn't enough to satisfy your Apple cravings today, the company has also taken the wraps off its first Thunderbolt equipped display and revealed a beefed up Mac Mini line-up. Read More
An update to the MacBook Air line-up is among a raft of new releases announced by Apple today. The new 11-inch and 13-inch models get Mac OS X Lion (which has also just landed), the latest Intel Core i5 and Core i7 dual-core processors, Thunderbolt ports and a backlit keyboard. Read More
Although LaCie was quick to follow Apple's unveiling of Thunderbolt in February with a new HDD supporting the technology, there have been few ripples in the new I/O pond since. Now, after a brief false start, some new Thunderbolt-equipped RAID storage systems from Promise and a Thunderbolt cable from Apple have appeared in the Apple store. Read More
Apple's desktop lineup has typically pushed users requiring plenty of fast I/O towards the Mac Pro - but the latest iMac refresh has broken the tradition. While quad-core Sandy Bridge CPUs and faster ATI Radeon HD GPUs are welcomed, it's the addition of Thunderbolt ports (one in the 21.5-inch and two in the 27-inch) that really ups the ante for a number of professional users. Read More
