
Thunderbolt can do 10 Gbps
...but what are those drives capable of? ...and what HDDs are in there (green drives)?
WD has announced its new Thunderbolt-bolstered MyBook, telling us that we can soon eyeball the super speeded-up gear at a demo at the Macworld/iWorld show. The company said: "Thunderbolt technology is capable of producing up to 10Gbps of throughput on each of two channels in both directions. "Users can experience very fast …
No, there is no mention of what drives they will put in them, but if they can transfer a 25-50GB file (a "standard size full-length HD movie") in less than 30 seconds, I'd guess SSDs? I mean I can't transfer a 50GB file using 7k2 disks in 30 seconds.
There was an article on cnet here that said by daisychaining them, they got 515MB/s writing and 770MB/s reading
Yes, the ones shown at CES even had a TB in and out ports, so you can still connect up to a DisplayPort monitor :)
God only knows how much they'll charge; probably even more than LaCie :(
I'm interested to see what interface this is going to use as well as which drives are physically capable of doing anything with data at that speed. The SATA 3 interface only has a theoretical maximum data throughput of 6Gbps!?! Also, the last time I looked, the fastest available drives could only manage a maximum data rate of around 157MB/s (approx. 1.2Gbps). 10Gbps? How? When? What interface? What drives?
"This unit has two drives. Therefore if it can read them in parallel that will easily saturate a 10Gig bus?"
Yes, because you'll use this exact device for an enterprise-level SAN or DAS....
Yes, Fiber Channel can pull 8 or 16Gbps, as Ethernet can pull 40Gbps by bonding 4 10Gbps ports. Why not bond 4 Thunderbolt ports while you're at it? 40Gbps each way. Benefit is, Thunderbolt can daisy chain too.
I own one of the first 'MyBooks' (the blue ring thingie which is only accessible through Window shares), a 'WorldBook' (the critter with the 'white stripe' and the 'Twonky' media server) and a 2Gb yet RAID1 setup WorldBook.
Quite frankly I think the hardware is pretty solid and nifty, yet it has one flaw... These drives seem to have this in common; when something starts to fail you're not really notified of it. The only reason I noticed that my mybook was having problems (after approx. 5 - 6 years of usage) was because some network connections started faltering. One moment a share was available, the other moment it was gone again.
I hope they also addressed this issue in the mean time. Because apart from that I've been extremely satisfied with WD's "My Book" series.
Given that there is no standard sized HD movie and the fact that it depends on the codec used, the settings used, the bitrate used, the length of movie and what resolution is used (Since HD can mean anything from 720p upwards) then using that as any reference has little or no meaning. Let's see some hard numbers instead shall we?
I've just noticed the MyBook LIVE versions, which have ethernet. May be what REAH mentioned above, but I hadn't seen them before. The price doesn't put them that far above an external usb drive. I'll wait until hdd supplies increase and prices drop and look at the 3T version. I'm surprised Seagate and the others (what others now I suppose) haven't yet copied this idea.
I've had a 1T WD green working 24/7 for most of a couple of years, still going fine, if not quickly.
I think to get more speed they should build Raid 0 directly into the hardware. Rather than have 4 platters of, say, 500GB each, they could could have 2 platters RAID 0'd to another 2 platters internally. 1 drive: Raid 0 performance.
Imagine if they did they that with this new tech. Speedy ----->