Thunderbolt hard drive enclosures

LaCie isn't appropriate for heavy use, and their offering isn't that great anyway. Intel hasn't promised thunderbolt for the masses until 2012. It's been relatively limited on development this year. I wouldn't expect it to be cheap before 2013.

The SSD version of the Little Big Disk uses two Intel 320s. Not the best they could possibly use.

Yep way too expensive.

Sadly I don't see this changing anytime soon. The problem is that building controllers for TB devices is expensive. It will likely reain so as long as Intel has such a tight grip on system.

Why?

You ean reasonably priced enclosures? If that is the case it might be a very long time.

It might more than double performance but such an enclosure needs to exist first. As alluded to above I don't think you will see such enclosures at reasonable prices anytime soon. What is reasonable, in my case within $100 of a USB case.

For the most part you are wasting time e-mailing companies asking about products not yet on the market. Most are just as secretive as Apple. Here and there a company might practice more open hardware development but frankly they all seem to run into unreasonable customer expectations. So if you are expecting answers to the question of when a product will come out you are expecting too much. However communicating with a company is always a good thing. If nothing else it puts a company on notice as far as new consumer desires go. Think of it as voting, you don't always get what you want but you can put people on notice.

It isn't pointless if you are using RAID for a bit more reliability.

FireWire is there to support existing users. It will go away shortly.

What is bothersome about your post though is this ides that Thunderbolt is some how a failure. I think it is sitting right where Apple and intel want it to sit. That is as a high end high performance port. It was never -NEVER- designed to be a low cost USB replacement. People need to get over this idea. People need to realize that a whole USB based system can go on a tiny card and ship as a product for a quarter of the cost of a TB cable. The two ports aren't even remotely in the same class.

It's a first generation port available only on macs and a couple Sony laptops, both using different connectors.

http://gizmodo.com/5816136/sonys-vai...by-thunderbolt

Then intel has their own idea. Basically Apple's solution can't really deliver power over the cable, so they're using this. Segmented standards are kind of a pain in the ass. None of them are good solutions. People seem to support Apple's solution as simple, but requiring some sort of integrated graphics to route from is a terribly limited design.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles...ltrabooks.html



eSATA is fast enough for most people. Lacie makes terrible enclosures. They aren't something you want for heavy use, as they really aren't designed for it. If you want to replace drives, buy from someone else. eSATA 6Gb/s cards are almost as fast as thunderbolt. You might take a minor speed hit on the conversion, but you can come pretty damn close to the thunderbolt enclosure with fast drives. Also western digital caviar black drives are pretty awesome. It's the green drives that suck.

This is why it might end up being seen as a failure, and is what could ultimately sink it unless users simply have no other option than to get mugged for TB peripherals.

How many ports does that Sonnet card have? You have my mind spinning here because a real cheap solution would be to retask an old PC enclosure. By that I mean stuff the adapter and eSATA card in a PC chassis and likewise install your new hard drives.

I always like the idea of recycling and frankly many a chassis gets trashed before it is physically worn out. The biggest problem is with powering up the power supply, you would need to power up the motherboard or rig the supply to turn on without.

As to your cost don't forget about the Apple only cable. In the end it is still a stiff price to pay for a TB drive system. You will be out close to $300 before you even get the drives and an enclosure to put them in.

This point of view is a huge problem in my book. First it assumes there is no value in high performance interfaces, when to the contrary history is full of examples of people paying extra for more performance. Second, it isn't like Apple has removed the option for affordable high performance USB devices. It is not a question of being mugged, rather it is the question of having options. Third, prices will likely come down in time, this I honestly believe. However I don't see the prices dropping as fast or as far as they did with USB. For that to happen somebody would have to market a fully compliant TB SoC at a reasonable price.

By SoC I mean basically everything, the I/O, the processor, TB I/O, power management, and possible even the RAM. When you look at USB supporting Micro Controllers you find chips with entire systems built in and these chips are cheap. The speeds TB operates at implies more expensive components. In the end you get what you pay for.

As to seeing this as a failure, well that is up to the individual. From Apples standpoint I think they see their new monitor as a justification for the port right there. If TB allows them to sell a high price monitor with each notebook sold or even a good fraction of those sold it will not be a failure in their eyes. On the other hand if you start out with unreasonable expectations and really don't understand the technology then TB might look like a failure. It is a failure due to ones crafting such an opinion in their mind though and not a reflection of reality.

Another way to look at this is the expense of Apples active cable. This should tell everyone that Apple sees little point in hooking up $75 hard drives with this port. Instead the value comes in when dealing with higher performance devices. Where higher performance implies more expensive.

As to the old PC to, to save on power you will likely want to unplug your motherboard. However most PC power supplies won't power up completely without being plugged in. There is a work around that you can find on the net. PC supplies are often used by experimenters, and hobbiests in this manner as they are a cheap source of several DC voltages.

Reports of hardware successes are always useful!


That really isn't that bad for a magnetic drive. I'd be happy too.

Wow that is one big box! For some reason I was expecting much smaller.

There are a lot of different ExpressCards out there.. This is probably a safe approach.

In any event glad that it is working out for you.