Adapters For ThunderBolt Drives and Accessories

ThunderBolt Interface Adapters and Port Converters for High-Speed Peripherals

ThunderBolt Drive Adapter Solutions

ThunderBolt GoFlex Adapters

Seagate's use of a UDI - Universal Drive Interface - in GoFlex desktop and portable hard drives has given them a leg up in the ThunderBolt drive market. Seagate already ships GoFlex backup drive docks and cables with USB2, USB 3.0 SuperSpeed, eSata and FireWire connections. They just started shipping thier GoFlex ThunderBolt adaptor for the GoFlex Desk and Portable drive series, priced at around $200 and $100 respectively.

ThunderBolt ExpressCard Adapters

Sonnet Technologies is currently shipping their Sonnet Echo ExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt Adapter. This external box can be used with a variety of 34mm PCI Express cards to support other drive interfaces from eSATA to FireWire 400/800 to USB 3.0 or USB2.

ThunderBolt eSATA Adapters

At CES, LaCie - who is already shipping Little BigDisk Thunderbolt SSD and spinning platter ThunderBolt RAID drive solutions - announced the LaCie eSATA Hub Thunderbolt Series which is a ThunderBolt to eSATA converter. Dual eSATA drive ports combined with dual ThunderBolt pass-through ports to allow daisy chaining other ThunderBolt adapters, drives, monitors and accessories.

Belkin ThunderBolt Dock

Much like the ThunderBolt hub built into Apple's ThunderBolt Cinema Display - Belkin is working on an external ThunderBolt drive and gadget docking station with a multitude of I/O ports. In addtion to ThunderBolt pass-through it includes three USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire 800 port, Gigbit Ethernet, HDMI video and a 1/8" analog audio jack and projected to retail for $299 if and when it ships much later in 2012. My concern with this ThunderBolt adapter is by the time it does ship, SuperSpeed USB 3.0 drives and accessories will have hit the mainstream and make the 10 times slower USB 2.0 ports on this ThunderBolt converter seem like 'too little, too late'.

Adapters For ThunderBolt

The beauty of the TunderBolt interface is its direct acess to a comptuer's internal PCI bus. As such it's an excellent 'Bridge' interface that allows a wide variety of other interfaces to adapt and convert to any port type needed.