a blog by Peter Leonard
Support for Thunderbolt, Apple/Intel’s new high-speed bus, has been slow in coming. Though all new MacBook Pro’s ship with the new port, neither Apple nor any third-parties have shipped any peripherals that take advantage of the the technology.
The first evidence that this could change showed up on the show floor at the National Association of Broadcasters last week. LaCie, which has an existing line of USB2/3 and FireWire 400/800 hard drives, was showing off a four-drive setup configured in a RAID, with each external drive connected serially with Thunderbolt cables:
You can see the new connection in heavy use on the back of the setup — the cables physically resemble MiniDisplayPort, but are capable of extremely high data throughput:
Here’s the back of one of these new drives — note that there’s no labels yet for the ports, but they will presumbably have the lightning icon which Apple is using for the technology:
Also on display was BlackMagic’s Ultrastudio SDI and HDMI to Thunderbolt converter, which will get high-definition video formats into and out of the new standard:
