If you have bought a new iMac or new Macbook you probably have noticed a new port on the side of your device – well it’s a Thunderbolt port – but up until today it was pretty much useless.
Well mac users will be able to use their fancy Thunderbolt ports for more than just a display port for the first time this week as Promise Pegasus has shipped the first in a line of external RAID hard drives.
And Apple has release the 2m cable and the necessary firmware update to allow you to transfer files at speeds that was only a pipe dream as of a few weeks ago.
When Apple introduced the latest refresh to the MacBook Pro line-up a couple of months back, everyone got all excited about the new hardware’s Thunderbolt port.
Thunderbolt is Apple new transfer technology which blows USB 3.0 out of the water for both speed and expense from the looks of it.
The R4 is a four-bay external drive with 4TB and 8TB capacities and Promise Pegasus are also offering the R6 which is a six-bay versions and supports 6TB and 12TB capacities.
Apple and Intel have touted Thunderbolt as the next great PC-to-peripheral interconnect, with its 10Gbps theoretical maximum throughput. This trumps both eSATA (3Gbps) and USB 3.0 (5Gbps), plus Thunderbolt can be daisy-chained so monitors, hard drives, and other peripherals can be connected together to the single Thunderbolt connector on newer iMacs and MacBook Pros.
Apple’s $49 Thunderbolt cable is 6.6 feet in length and has a Thunderbolt connector on each end. Apple has stated that the new circuitry and interconnects for the new cables are part of the reason for their initial high price. Prices are expect to go down once more devices and cable manufacturers come out with product.
And if you're lucky enough to own both a new MacBook Pro and an iMac, you can connect them together in Target Disk Mode. This lets you mount one computer as an external drive on the other, just like in the old FireWire Target Disk Mode.
The Thunderbolt cable, as well as a Thunderbolt software update for compatible Macs, is available now.