Firewire has perhaps been a rare
example of Apple backing the wrong technology. For a while it was faster than
the prevailing USB standard, but had far fewer peripherals available. The only
category it ever dominated was tape-based digital video cameras, and where are
they now? In the last couple of years, USB 3 and eSATA ports have become
commonplace on PCs, providing fast connections for all peripherals and high-speed
storage respectively, while the Mac’s FireWire 800 - twice the speed of the
original interface, but even less widely supported - looks increasingly white
and elephantine.
Thunderbolt storage
Then, last year, along came Thunderbolt,
which has rapidly made its way into every current Mac except the ageing Mac
Pro. Serving the purposes of USB 3, eSATA and a digital display interface in
one port, Thunderbolt is incredibly fast and very flexible. It takes the same
form as the Mini DisplayPort featured on Macs from late 2008 until 2011,
allowing existing screens to be attached to new Macs. Apple has upgraded its
own Cinema Display to Thunderbolt, and current iMacs also accept video input
from other Thunderbolt Macs, so you can use your iMac as a big screen for your
MacBook while at your desk.
But the resemblance to Mini DisplayPort is
skin deep: Thunderbolt is a new and powerful technology for connecting external
storage without bottlenecks. So what kinds of drive can you buy, and just how
fast are they?
At the same time as carrying both audio and
video signals to displays (if you so choose), Thunderbolt can send data via the
same PCI Express protocol that’s used for internal expansion cards in the Mac
Pro - to other types of device, including video capture hardware and super-fast
storage. Up to six Thunderbolt devices can be connected to a single port, as
long as each one has a second port built into it to allow the next to be ‘daisy
chained’, much like with FireWire. At the end of the chain, your display can be
added as a seventh device.
What
we like about Thunderbolt is that it doesn’t just complement powerful computers
used for demanding tasks, such as the iMac and MacBook Pro
Six devices on aportpales in comparison to
FireWire’s limit of 63, but Thunderbolt wins hands-down on bandwidth. A single
port provides two channels: one for sending data to devices downstream from the
Mac, and another to receive data back from them. Each channel has an impressive
bandwidth of 10Gbit/sec, about 12 times greater than FireWire 800. As with
other interfaces, the theoretical limit is unlikely to be reached by any device
in practice, but that’s a lot of headroom. So Thunderbolt is ideal for highendvideo and storage devices. It’s well
suited to handling massive amounts of data when working with multiple streams
of HD and even higher-resolution cinema-quality video.
Thunderbolt peripherals have appeared more
slowly than we’d have hoped, however, and the first devices to be announced
were up towards the four-figure price range. It’s taken a while for more
affordable and non-specialist products to appear, but we’ve now turned up
enough for a decent roundup, as you’ll see here, and more will appear in the
coming months.
Thunderbolt
is a key feature of some new motherboards from leading suppliers MSI and Asus
Will it catch on? After FireWire’s
fizzle, the question has to be asked, and the slow arrival of compatible
devices has provoked some sceptical mutterings. Two signs are encouraging. One
is that Thunderbolt works amazingly well; it’s a master of all trades that
could easily replace every other interface, relegating USB to a keyboard and
mouse connector for people who don’t like wireless. The other is that, after an
anxious wait, it’s finally becoming available on PCs. Thunderbolt is a key
feature of some new motherboards from leading suppliers MSI and Asus, and will
be included on some notebooks from Lenovo (formerly IBM’s laptop division) and
other manufacturers.
That’s not to say Thunderbolt is out of the
woods: after all, some PCs featured FireWire - just not enough.
