Final words and conclusion
Final words and conclusion
ThunderBolt at this time poses a myriad of trivial dilemma's. On one side it's sexy new tech, extremely fast and extremely capable. The problem however is it's adoption rate versus the negatives during introduction. First and foremost two things need to happen for ThunderBolt to become successful. The first one is simple, it needs to be a hot pluggable connector. Intel is hard at work to get a new driver set out making the solution hot pluggable so you can insert and remove devices much like you can with USB devices. But right now the ease of use is lacking.
Secondly and this is the most alarming factor, pricing. ThunderBolt storage units are expensive as they mostly are ported from Mac OS based products which is an expensive platform. Cables, the controller IC and the actual devices will need to get much cheaper otherwise the TB implementation might end up similar towards FireWire on the PC.
See, people are savvy with USB 3.0, it's very fast already and most PC users just migrated to it. At 5 Gbps (say 625 MB/sec) that host controller already delivers beyond what we all need. So why spend 50 EUR extra (on average) on a motherboard supporting ThunderBolt alongside much more expensive cables and devices you can connect to it. So yes -- pricing is an immediate issue.
For what would you use ThunderBolt? Well, if it will get hot pluggable, obviously for portable storage. I foresee a wide platform on mobile products. On the PC side, things are a little more difficult. You could connect a high-performance SSD storage unit, but really most manufacturers will go for PCI-Express solutions as any PC already has these slots. In the far future one could also drive external graphics from the ThunderBolt connector, but here as well that would be more interesting for mobile products.
Where the ThunderBolt connector can make a big difference is network storage, thus a NAS (Network attached unit) unit. Well I should restate that towards a DAS (Device Attached Unit). I do foresee a nice and wide platform for such products on ThunderBolt.
There are many advantages to ThunderBolt, it really is a blazing fast connector to use. We love the fact that you can daisy chain multiple devices, but we do run into a limitation of the copper cable you get roughly 3 meters to fool around with after which you'll run into problems. The optical sibling however will eliminate that issue, yet needs to be released first.
Thunderbolt is fast though, the LaCie device we used today has two Intel 320 SSDs setup in Windows RAID. And that didn't do the hip new thunderbolt connector any justice really -- although we where able to push numbers to roughly 430 MB/sec the overall bandwidth is much more extensive and promising.
We definitely like ThunderBolt, the daisy chain option and the extensive bandwidth available on the port make it shine. The install base however for the time being will remain small we feel. Pricing of all components needed to get this going needs to come down to USB 3.0 level before we can see it take off. That might change however once we reach optical connectors. But until then it will likely remain to be a niche connector that hardly will be used by anyone.
Thanks go out to ASUS for releasing the P8Z77-V Pro Thunderbolt edition which honestly is a more affordable solution in the 200~250 USD range.
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