The Elgato Thunderbolt SSD “drive combines a solid-state drive with Intel’s lightning-fast (sorry) Thunderbolt connector,” Kenny Hemphill reports for Register Hardware. “Inside its charcoal metal enclosure is a 3Gbps Sata SSD, 120GB in this case, made by SanDisk.”
“There’s a single Thunderbolt connection on the back. Bus-powered Thunderbolt drives like this one must always be the last drive in a chain as they can’t pass the necessary 10W of power to a downstream port,” Hemphill reports. “Tests using QuickBench 4 showed just how blazingly fast this drive is. For files between 2MB and 10MB in size, it recorded an average read speed of 265.8MBps and an average write speed of 257.4MBps.”
Hemphill reports, “By comparison, the built-in SSD in my MacBook Air achieved 217.2MBps and 204.8MBps, respectively… Suggested Price: £350 / US$$429.95 (120GB), £570 / US$699.95 (240GB) + £50 / US$69 for Thunderbolt cable.”
More in the full article, including photos of the drive, here.
Related articles:
Apple could own ‘Thunderbolt’ trademark in 30 days – March 15, 2012
Intel: Optical Thunderbolt cables coming this year – March 13, 2012
LaCie’s wicked fast Thunderbolt Drives turn MacBooks into Mac Pros – February 15, 2012
Belkin previews new Thunderbolt Express Dock at CES 2012 – January 9, 2012
Apple’s Thunderbolt cable costs $49 because it’s smart – June 30, 2011
Thunderbolt-equipped Mac: You’re so going to want this – May 5, 2011
5 Reasons why Thunderbolt is a big deal – May 3, 2011
With the limited capacity available coupled with phenomenally high prices are there any real world applications out there that will take advantage of this configuration?
My first 1GB drive was $1200
Gee, I don’t know if hard drives are going to catch on with such phenomenally high prices…
A 5 meg drive for the Apple ][ was $3K if I remember correctly.
I paid $900 for a 20Mb Rodime external HD for my Mac plus back in 1987. It measured 1 foot by 1 foot by 4 inches high and made a perfect sand for the Mac to stand on. I could only fill about 3/4 of it after one year.
Insane……
Two years after that, I got the 40MB version of this “zero footprint” drive for the bargain price of $700.
For me, it was $630 for a 30mb GCC Technologies zero-footprint in 1990.
1985/86, I bought a SuperMac external SCSI drive for my Mac512ke that I had a SCSI port put on.
SCSI port: $500
SuperMac 10MB HDD: $1399.
Mac 512ke: $2500 with UCLA discount.
This stuff today is a steal!!!
That brings back memories. Like Buster, I put a 20 MB Rodime under my lab Mac Plus in 1988 ($NZ 2,100). I remember that it was a perfect size and colour match. A year later, I was able to upgrade it to a 40 MB drive, and the 20 MB Rodime was relegated to beneath my Mac 512 (not a good colour match) with the battery compartment modified to fit a SCSI port. I can’t recall the cost of the modification but it was eye-watering.
I purchased a 5MB HD for my Apple IIGS when they first came out at $1,500. Problem is where you need that speed is in Video Editing where you also need many times the disk space.
*snort* 🙂
I’m not certain, but I think my first external drives (a pair of 143k 5.25″ floppy drives) were around $300 each. They sat beautifully under my 9″ monochrome “Green Screen” on top of my Apple ][+
High-end gamers and researchers will buy them first, and, like all hard drives before them, they’ll eventually come down in price.
“Intel’s lightning-fast (sorry) Thunderbolt”. Are lightning and thunder different things or two parts of the same thing?
“Thunderbolt” and ‘lightning’ are synonyms, yes. “Thunder’ is the noise.
Zeus threw thunderbolts, remember…?
So did my Pikachu.
That’s great, El Gato.
Now how about a bus powered EyeTV…..again?
Give it a year. Eventually a growing user base is going to push prices down.