Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has recently announced that it will manufacture a 4TB external hard drive, housed in an 8TB two-drive RAID system. The hard drive will have Thunderbolt, Firewire 400/800 and USB 2.0 ports. The drive is geared towards creative professionals, and comes pre-formatted for Mac OSX – although it can be reformatted for Windows computers. No word yet on pricing. This Thunderbolt drive is expected to ship before the end of the year.
The long-promised LaCie Thunderbolt-enabled Little Big Disk is now available for sale. You can purchase a 1TB Thunderbolt drive for $399.95 or a 2TB Thunderbolt drive for $499.95. This is the first Thunderbolt hard drive priced for the consumer market.
For now, these drives are only available for purchase online at the Apple Store and they are showing 1-2 week shipping times. Curiously, these external hard drives are not yet available through LaCie’s own website.
To use this drive, you will have to purchase the $49 Apple Thunderbolt cable separately.
Apple has added two computers and a monitor to its list of Thunderbolt compatible products. The Mac Mini and MacBook Air have been updated with Thunderbolt connectors, as has the 27” LED display.
Along with Thunderbolt compatibility, both computers have received a considerable performance boost.
The MacBook Air, which comes in 11” and 13” versions, is reportedly up to twice the speed of its previous iteration. The MacBook Air base models sell for $999 to $1,599, although you can save yourself $5 off this price by purchasing from Amazon!
We now have a little better understanding of why Apple are charging $50 for their new Thunderbolt cable. It turns out that the cable comes with 2 on-board chips, which allow for “active cabling”, rather than “passive cabling”. Active cabling is required for high speed data transfer, as it greatly improves the signal-to-noise ratio on the cable. This active cabling is powered by a pair of Thunderbolt transceivers from Gennum. You can see these Gennum chips in the photo below, thanks to the team at iFixit who ripped open a cable to see what was inside.
The Promise Pegasus RAID hard drive, enabled with Thunderbolt, is now available for purchase. This is a high capacity external RAID enclosure intended for the professional market.
The Pegasus is available as R4 or R6 models – referring to the number of hard drives (4 or 6) contained in the enclosure. The R4 comes in 4TB and 8TB sizes, selling for $999 and $1,499 respectively. The R4 boasts transfer speeds of 500MB/s bi-directionally – ten times the speed of USB 2.0. The R6 comes in 6TB and 12TB sizes, selling for $1,499 and $1,999 respectively. The R6 transfer data at speeds of 800MB/s bi-directionally. The 4 or 6 hard drives contained in the enclosure operate at a speed of 7200 RPM.
At long last, Apple has released a Thunderbolt cable. This is the first, and currently only, Thunderbolt cable available for purchase. You can pick up this cable through the Apple store online for $49.00. This cable is not as cheap as we would have wanted, but hopefully, we will see much cheaper third party cables available on the market soon.
As you can see, the connectors are identical to Apple’s mini-Display connection. The cable is 2m in length and comes in white.
You can use this cable to connect to your Apple display or to one of the brand new Promise Pegasus Thunderbolt RAID external hard drives.
The Promise Pegasus R4 was briefly seen for sale on the Apple Store, before being pulled.
The 8TB (4 x 2TB) external hard drive was listed at $1,399.95.
While the reasons that the Pegasus Thunderbolt hard drive were pulled from the store, expect to see this product fully available for sale sometime soon. There had been rumors that a Thunderbolt drive would ship this week, and likely, we will see this device and perhaps the LaCie Little Big Drive shipping very soon.
LaCie demoed their Thunderbolt Little Big Disk at Computex in Taiwan, showing high speed data transfer and daisy-chaining multiple Little Big Drives with Thunderbolt. They demoed data transfers of 835 Mb/s in this configuration.
LaCie also confirmed a summer 2011 release for the Thunderbolt Little Big Disk. Although we do not yet have any final word on pricing, it can reasonably be expected that the product will sell for about the same $300 price as the LaCie Little Big Disk 1TB that connects via USB/Firewire/eSATA
As June approaches and we find ourselves still waiting for an actual Thunderbolt hard drive to ship, the Seagate GoFlex Ultra-Portable External Hard Drive for Mac is the closest thing we have to an actual shipping Thunderbolt external hard drive.
Just to be clear, these drives do not currently have a Thunderbolt connection. They have USB2.0 and FireWire 800 connections. However, the actual connection is removable and replaceable. So currently, you can swap out the USB2.0 connection for the FireWire 800 connection. It is child’s play to swap out the connection — each one plugs into the hard drive much like you plug the cable into your iPod, iPhone or iPad. You can see a photo of how to swap out those connections here.
As of early May 2011, you cannot buy a Thunderbolt hard drive.
At least two drives are expected to hit the market in the summer of 2011.
First, the LaCie Little Big Disk is a consumer oriented external hard drive that will come in 1TB or 500GB sizes. The 1TB model should cost about $300 — the price of the current 1TB USB-model.
Second, Promise Technologies will release an external hard drive oriented towards graphics professionals in the Pegasus Thunderbolt DAS. This is either a 4-bay or 6-bay RAID drive, that comes in 4TB, 8TB or 12TB sizes. Promise have not yet released information on pricing.