Good price for it and it's nice, but only for the 2011 MacBook Pros that had Thunderbolt but no USB 3.0. Otherwise, USB 3.0 is much more cost effective and offers the same performance (the bottleneck is the hard drive anyway)
^ but it will never be as cost effective as USB3 unless someone *needs* to daisy chain several of them.
Never is a quite big for that statement as concerning "cost effective"
If you review my comment last time (see deal history tab below) on how it would/may be possible to run all / most your peripherals through the one port.
Now that way "may" be just one of many possible cost effective scenarios.
^ Thunderbolt will never be mainstream for the masses just like firewire wasn't. That's going to always keep the price higher than whatever version of USB it's competing against.
It won't be long until motherboards have a half dozen USB3 ports on low end boards and at least 4 more on midrange and better boards. There isn't a need to run everything through one port and it also means that if any product in the chain fails then it may render everything after it inoperable.
Having to run a continuous cable along all your peripherals could also be unwieldy and difficult to plan for tidiness, and nobody wants to pay more for something they don't really need or benefit from.
I predict we'll see proprietary if not standardized super speed, short distance wireless data busses before we see mainstream single chain cable linked peripherals.
I'm an Apple fanboy, and I think I'm inclined to agree that Thunderbolt just isn't going to go mainstream, just like Firewire. :\
I'm also more of a fan of being able to disconnect one drive or device from a hub. Imagine how annoying it would be to unmount everything just to pull one drive out of daisy chain of 5. (Yes, I have 5 external USB 2.0 drives plugged into one system right now.)
Comments & Reviews (7)
You really think Seagate built this whole "Thunderbolt" system just for the 2011 MacBook Pro ??
There are PC boards and systems out there with Thunderbolt ports..
$40 price drop since Feb 13th.. keep on going...
Never is a quite big for that statement as concerning "cost effective"
If you review my comment last time (see deal history tab below) on how it would/may be possible to run all / most your peripherals through the one port.
Now that way "may" be just one of many possible cost effective scenarios.
It won't be long until motherboards have a half dozen USB3 ports on low end boards and at least 4 more on midrange and better boards. There isn't a need to run everything through one port and it also means that if any product in the chain fails then it may render everything after it inoperable.
Having to run a continuous cable along all your peripherals could also be unwieldy and difficult to plan for tidiness, and nobody wants to pay more for something they don't really need or benefit from.
I predict we'll see proprietary if not standardized super speed, short distance wireless data busses before we see mainstream single chain cable linked peripherals.
I'm also more of a fan of being able to disconnect one drive or device from a hub. Imagine how annoying it would be to unmount everything just to pull one drive out of daisy chain of 5. (Yes, I have 5 external USB 2.0 drives plugged into one system right now.)
Thank you!