I had some time to demonstrate some of the upcoming Thunderbolt accessories from external drive makers at CES earlier today. We briefly discussed a few others from OCZ, LaCie, Belkin and Elgato earlier in the week. First up is the Western Digital MyBook Thunderbolt Duo:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX-My424O7g]
These are going to compare nicely to the Promise RAID setup that has similar speeds, but it does not have a price or release date yet. The vibe seemed to be like Q2 with perhaps an announcement at Macworld.
Next up is the Hitachi G-Drive series of Thunderbolt Drives, and these drives are 8TBs…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrCbdJ5Czj8]
The cost for 8TB is about $1100, and it appears that —at least in this setups— the Hitachi’s is slightly slower than the Western Digital.
Finally, Seagate had two drives that are really just Thunderbolt to SATA3 adapters. The portable variety is powered thru the Thunderbolt connection; however, the bottleneck in portable drive speed did not have a great showing. The desktop “docking” version showed a bit better. Results here will go up with faster SSDs and disk drive arrays that the others’ employ. The good news is that Seagate’s adapters are going to be announced next week and should ship shortly thereafter. The prices are also very low at $99 for portable and $189 for desktop.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET5aGBTQuKs]
