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Thunderbolt Peripherals For The Mac

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Thunderbolt Peripherals For Macs

Apple released the first thunderbolt equipped computers in early 2011 with the introduction of both the Macbook Pro and iMac 2011 models. Now all that's needed is some thunderbolt peripherals to take advantage of the blazing fast port. Here's a spotlight of what's available so far.

Apple Thunderbolt Display

The Apple Thunderbolt Display has finally arrived and features a large 27" screen with a 2560-by-1440 resolution. The screen is LED-backlit and features an integrated FaceTime HD camera.
The display can also act as a hub with its three USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire 800 port as well as a Gigabit Ethernet port.

What's new is the dual Thunderbolt ports on the monitor itself. The first connection goes directly to your Thunderbolt equipped computer, and the second Thunderbolt port allows for daisy-chaining additional Thunderbolt devices. Although the picture shows two monitors being daisy chained together, you can conceivable add many more monitors to your setup by simply connecting them up through each monitor's second Thunderbolt port. The maximum number would only be limited by the power of your graphics card (and of course your budget).

Video Capture With Thunderbolt - The BlackMagic UltraStudio 3D Breakout Box

Blackmagic has a new Thunderbolt breakout box that will be shipping in July, 2011. The UltraStudio 3D has both SDI and HDMI 1.4 input and output connections capable of handling SD and HD video along with uncompressed video streams. It also has analog video connections along with audio inputs and outputs as well. Blackmagic is targetting 3D production workflows with the device since it has the bandwidth necessary for 3D workflow. It retails for $995.

What about the latest Thunderbolt Raid Enclosures from Pegasus?

The R4 Thunderbolt Raid Enclosure (which comes with either 1, 2, 4, or 8 TB worth of drives inside) is now available for sale directly through Amazon:

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Video Capture With Thunderbolt - The Matrox MX02 Lineup.

Matrox Mac Thunderbolt MX02 Video Capture

Matrox will Thunderbolt enable its MXO2 line of video I/O boxes, including the MXO2 Mini, MXO2 LE, and MXO2 portable devices and the MXO2 Rack rack-mount device. The Matrox MX02 portables are notable as these lightweight, portable devices can be run off standard field batteries.

Are there any thunderbolt enclosures for external hard drives?

There doesn't appear to be any, but check the bottom of the following page for upcoming Thunderbolt products:

http://www.apple.com/thunderbolt/ (that's Apple's Thunderbolt page).

These Peripherals Are Going To Be Expensive

The Pegasus 8 TB external hard drive / raid controller with Thunderbolt is currently $1400. The Thunderbolt port is so fast that since the drives inside this enclosure are SATA spinning hard drives, they aren't fast enough to saturate the Thunderbolt port. If you really want to get up to a speed near to the Thunderbolt ports capability, you'll need:

Atleast two Solid State Drives (SSD). SSDs are flash memory based and have no spinning parts to slow them down.

Run the drives in a RAID 0 configuration.

The Little Big Disk by Lacie, to be released sometime in late 2011, is a portable RAID storage device featuring either two hard disk drives or the faster flash solid-state disks (SSD). This should be an affordable option for those looking to take full advantage of their Thunderbolt ports.

Upcoming Modules

As the Thunderbolt standard gains more acceptance, and both Intel and Apple throw their collective weights behind it, we'll see more third party manufacturers bringing more Thunderbolt equipped peripherals to the market. Anything dealing with Thunderbolt on the mac, we'll be keeping up on new developments in the space, including but not limited to: