ThunderBolt Products Starting to Roll Out at NAB

Monday April 11, 2011 11:42 am PDT by Arnold Kim

Pegasus R4 RAID w/ Thunderbolt, photo by @josh_diamond

The 2011 National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show is underway. While the event is primarily targeted at Audio/Video/Film professionals, Apple fans will be interested to see that companies are finally starting introduce Thunderbolt-compatible devices into the market. Jigsaw Broadcast posts a brief summary of the some of Thunderbolt solutions introduced so far. They include products from AJA, Blackmagic, Promise, and Matrox. All are targeted at video professionals, but finally shows some industry adoption of the new connectivity standard.

Apple and Intel launched Thunderbolt alongside the new MacBook Pro revisions in February. Thunderbolt promises faster connectivity than USB 3.0 and FireWire and we expect it to be included in all future Mac products.

Promise was one of the first companies that announced support for RAID Thunderbolt drive enclosures back in February. Those enclosures aren't yet shipping, but at least a couple of early prototypes are being demoed on the NAB floor. @sforde reports on one at the Adobe booth:

Wow! We have 1 of only 2 promise raids in world with thunderbolt at the Adobe booth at #NAB. CS5.5 screams on it.

The other must be at the Blackmagic booth which is pictured above. Meanwhile, the big anticipated news from NAB is Apple's announcement of a new version of Final Cut Pro. That news should arrive tomorrow night if rumors prove true.

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diamond.g
114 months ago

Drive arrays can easily exceed 10 Gbps - today a 2 drive RAID 0 array can hit 10 Gbps.

Single drives faster than TBolt already exist - 12 Mbps SSD drive (http://www.fusionio.com/products/iodriveduo/).

TBolt devices haven't even hit the market, but TBolt is already too slow for many uses.


12Mbps? you sure you didn't mean 1.5GBs?
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AidenShaw
114 months ago
Ummm, look around

Would be a while before we see any 10Gbps SSDs (hard drives will never be that fast)


Drive arrays can easily exceed 10 Gbps - even with spinning hard drives. Today a 2 SSD drive RAID 0 array can hit 10 Gbps with consumer-grade drives.

Single drives faster than TBolt already exist - 12 Gbps SSD drive (http://www.fusionio.com/products/iodriveduo/) 48 Gbps SSD drive (http://www.fusionio.com/products/iodriveoctal/).

TBolt devices haven't even hit the market, but TBolt is already too slow for many uses.
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