Ever since Apple and Intel introduced the Thunderbolt high-speed data connectivity standard back in late February, there has been speculation about whether the standard would support booting from external disks. At that initial release on revamped MacBook Pros, Andy Ihnatko reported that booting was not supported, although Target Disk Mode was supported. But a report from The Mac Observer early last month indicated that booting from disk would be supported over Thunderbolt.
With Apple's Thunderbolt cable and the first third-party drive systems hitting the Apple Store yesterday, Apple posted a few support articles outlining some of the Thunderbolt functionality, but failing to disclose any booting capabilities and thus leaving potential customers still in the dark about compatibility.
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It now appears, however, that we do have confirmation that booting over Thunderbolt is supported, as we received word yesterday from a reader who had received multiple confirmations from LaCie representatives that the feature will indeed be supported. Meanwhile, AnandTech has already received one of the new 12 TB RAID systems from Promise and confirms that booting over Thunderbolt is supported.
Top Rated Comments
The fact that they are currently the only people making them doesn't mean it's proprietary.
This is the beauty of MacOS that you can easily clone (a live running) system to external drives and than boot up the same (or complete different Mac) from that image. Would have been sad not to support this.
Didn't we have a story last week where either HP or Sony was adding Thunderbolt technology to their systems, but under a different name?
Just like an HDMI cable that sells for $75 at a retail store can be purchased for $10 from other suppliers, I expect that in a few months, we'll be able to find TB cables selling in the $5-10 range.