Ultra-Fast ThunderBolt External SSD Disk Drives - Now Shipping!

You might have to dig to find it but the first ThunderBolt SSD drive is now shipping. The LaCie Little Big Disk SSD Thunderbolt Drive offers its Little Big Disk line is now listed. With just a few days for an estimated ship time, and priced at $899, the drive's capacity is listed at 240GB (Dual 2.5" 120GB SSDs) preconfigured as a Striped RAID 0 array delivering up to 480 MB/s transfer rates.

Now Listed @ Amazon

240GB ThunderBolt SSD Drive

Now Shipping: The Elgato Thunderbolt 120GB Solid State Drive. There's also a 240GB size external TBolt backup drive listed as well - at a steeper price. Neither comes with the required $49 Apple TBolt cable. ElGato has long been known for it's TV tuner for Mac product line for those who want to capture video or record television on their Macintosh. Interesting to see them branch out into other types of Apple computer accessories.

One of the most critical computer peripherals own is a backup disk. Ideally, one that supports multiple interfaces and a fast drive mechanism for quick backups and transfers. External ThunderBolt hard drives using Flash Memory Solid-State drives are likely to bring unprecedented back-up speeds to photo, music and video libraries, drive copying and disk cloning. ThunderBolt SSD drives for Mac or PC will make for super-quick incremental and full backups.

ThunderBolt SSD Drive Speeds


The 10GBps ThunderBolt I/O spec far exceeds eSATA and the data transfer capabilities of any wired computer peripheral interface spec to date. As such, SSD flash memory drives are the best match. TBolt supports Dual Multi-Channel Bi-Directional communications driectly off the PCI Express bus. It really is a huge leap forward for technology. Traditional spinning platter drives - even the fastest - can barely utilize a 10th of the available bandwidth of this new I/O standard. Single SSD drive storage speeds currently top out near 3Gbps - basically the limits of the currently dominant SATA II disk drive interface. They a far better match for T-Bolt's capabilities than any regular HDD.

A new generation of SATA III SSD's are here, most notably with the insanely fast OCZ Vertex 4 line and the comparable Lexar/Crucial M4 SSD series drives on the cutting edge of performance.

Dual-drive ThunderBolt SSD drive arrays like Sonnet Technologies and LaCie are quite interesting, since the two or more SSD's can allow striped Reads and Writes across multiple SSD drives at once. So RAID 0 configuration Thunderbolt solid-state drives are poised to deliver unprecedented performance - while still leaving available bandwidth for other high and low-demand ThunderBolt accessories on the bus.

Western Digital - Seagate Consumer ThunderBolt Drives


Seagate is finally making some progress with it's ThunderBolt GoFlex drives and adapter. Western Digital recently jumped on the ThunderBolt bandwagon with it's dual-drive WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo 4TB Drive. Western Digital in particular has been rather agressive making backward compatible USB 3.0 SuperSpeed hard drives standard across it's line of portable and desktop drives. Anticipate they'll probably bring a broader range of ThunderBolt port drives to market rather quickly -- and branch into the solid-state disk market as well. There's just too much money to be made - and too many benefits to the consumer - to drag their heels on ThunderBolt for very long. Otherwise, LaCie will eat their lunch...

ThunderBolt interfaces directly to a computer's internal PCI-Express bus. So it can be an 'On-Ramp' for other legacy peripheral bus technologies. We'll soon see a wide range of ThunderBolt adapters, converters and bridge devices to USB 3.0 SuperSpeed, USB2, FireWire, eSata and other types of external drives and devices. This will provide compatibility with a wide range of existing high-speed disks, peripherals AND computer displays.

Shipping Computers With Built-In ThunderBolt Ports


First introduced on Apple's MacBook Pro laptops in 2011, ThunderBolt ports are now standard equipment on all Macintosh desktop and laptop models with the exception of the Mac Pro tower.

Entry-Level ThunderBolt Mac

Apple MacBook Pro 13.3"

Explore This Mid-To-High-End Thunder-Bolt Enabled 15 Inch MacBook
Apple MacBook Pro 15.4"

For a Top-Of-The-Line T-Bolt Capable Computer:
Apple MacBook Pro 17"