Thunderbolt Pros and Cons

ByMike Moffit

One feature of the newest generation of Apple computers is something so new that when the machines were released, there wasn’t even any outboard hardware available to take advantage of it. I am, of course, talking about the Thunderbolt interface developed by Intel and Apple.

It combines two separate 10 Gbps channels—one for video and one for data—into a plug with the same form factor as the Mini DisplayPort already present on recent generations of laptops and desktops. We’ve been waiting pretty excitedly to hear any news or reviews—10Gbps is just such a huge jump from current FireWire and USB technology, which sit at 800Mbps and 480Mbps respectively. It’s even twice as fast as the cool (but still mostly unused) USB 3.0.

Apple started selling a Thunderbolt cable and some Thunderbolt-equipped RAID systems, and there are some early reports out there. And so far, it seems to be performing up to the hype. A MacBook Pro with a RAID system can have transfer rates up to four times that of FireWire 800 and almost 20 times that of USB 2.0. As always with these kinds of things, your mileage will vary with your hardware and type of work you are doing, but those are some serious numbers!

The thing that remains to be seen is whether this new interface will catch on. Proprietary interfaces traditionally don’t do well. Apple’s FireWire, for instance, is a great interface—superior to USB, really—but USB’s universality and low cost has pretty much crowded FireWire out… even Apple stopped offering it on the MacBook, in part bowing to the fact that USB is by far the interface of choice in the world.

Thunderbolt isn’t Apple-proprietary (Sony has announced a Thunderbolt-equipped Vaio) but it is Intel-proprietary. That may be fine for Apple users, but Intel certainly has competition out there, and USB 3.0—while slow to take off—is in use by other chip/board makers, most notably AMD.

We’ll have to wait and see, but for now I’m counting down the days until I can buy a Thunderbolt drive or two…

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