Apple ThunderBolt Drives : Ultra-Fast Backups For Mac

The second wave of announced Apple ThunderBolt backup drive solutions are starting to reach the market. The multi-drive Pegasus RAID and LaCie ThunderBolt Hard Drives are now listed at Amazon and shipping from the Apple Store Online. We're still waiting for Seagate and others to ship more affordable, more average-consumer oriented ThunderBolt backup drive solutions.

In the meantime, Apple is shipping the new ThunderBolt Cinema Display and rolled ThunderBolt enabled MacBook Air, Mac mini desktops in additon to the Thunderbolt iMac models a few months after the intial ThunderBolt MacBook Pro. It's unfortunate that Apple did not deliver a working ThunderBolt backup solution to take advantage of it the day the very first TBolt MacBook's shipped. Unfortunately the first products that shipped from Promise Technology are high-end multi-drive RAID storage backup solutions priced for the Professional A/V market. More affordable Apple backup ThunderBolt drive options are finally here from LaCie Technologies.

Shipping LaCie ThunderBolt Backup Drives For Mac

   

LaCie 1TB ThunderBolt Platter Drive	ThunderBolt Cable *Sold Separately*	LaCie ThunderBolt 2TB Platter Drive
1TB ThunderBolt Drive Dual 500GB Drives	$49 Apple ThunderBolt Cable NOT Included With Drives	2TB LaCie ThunderBolt Drive Dual 1 Terabyte Drives

It isn't just Pro Video Editors, Music Studios or DVD and Photo Archive Companies that benefit from Mac backups and auxillary storage over ThunderBolt. Anyone who has data to move from point A to B will appreciate the lighting speed ThunderBolt ports can provide.

If there's one 'gotcha' to reading from - or backing up to - a ThunderBolt harddrive, it's limitations in the current speed of conventional hard drives and even that of solid-state SSD hard drives for Mac and Windows backups. (Remember, ThunderBolt is a cross-platform technology that will benefit both Apple and PC users.) While 2 to 4 times faster than mechanical hard drives, even the fastest single SSD made can't fill even half of ThunderBolt's amazing data pipeline.

The ONLY technology that can truly leverage 10GBps TBolt and provide best Mac backup speeds will be in multi-drive platter arrays or pairs of flash-memory based SSD ThunderBolt drives. The most demanding, data-intensive commercial users will want multiple-drive ThunderBolt RAID storage systems using 2 or more SSD's for peak throughput.

Last Updated: Feb. 5th, 2012