Read us also on TG Daily in a few hours' time
|
|
|
Lacie's Little Big Disk is small next to Thunderbolt's capacity
THE FIRST Thunderbolt technology product from Lacie will arrive slowly with a summer launch, despite its announcement today.
Called the Little Big Disk, this external hard drive has two 250GB Intel 510 series solid state disk (SSD) drives for a whopping half Terabyte of capacity. However if Thunderbolt is so fast at 10Gbps everything on the SSDs is going to be able to be sent somewhere else in just under seven minutes. Considering that, it doesn't seem like quite such a big disk.
Philippe Spruch, chairman and general manager of Lacie said, "Lacie is excited to be one of the first to deliver Thunderbolt technology with the Lacie Little Big Disk."
Lacie goes on to say on its website that users who worked in the movie industry could "edit on-set during a day of filming" and then transfer everything to an edit suite within seconds. Assuming of course this isn't via an Internet connection and is instead from one part of the movie studio to another, via a Thunderbolt connection. µ
Share this:
Share
Your USB example is a good one, it's true, USB is absolutely horrible for bulk data transfer. USB2 is 480 Mb/s, which is 60 MB/s. Yet you're lucky to break 30 MB/s in real world transfer speed. So about 50%. But that's because USB sucks. It's just a horrible protocol for bulk data transfer. Plus USB uses PIO mode, which is stupid slow. Better interfaces like PATA, SATA, Firewire, and now Thunderbolt all use DMA mode, which is way way faster than PIO mode. They also have very little protocol overhead. Firewire for example, is 800 Mb/s. With 8/10 bit encoding, that's 80 MB/s theoretical maximum. Yet it achieves 78 MB/s in real world transfer - very very close to its theoretical maximum. SATA is this way too, and so is Thunderbolt. So no, you are not correct in assuming that we'll never see those promised speeds.
But you can daisy chain devices, so I can see people hitting the peak.
Yes, pull up the NIST list. Nobody cares. Sticklers on MiB vs MB, b versus bit, etc. are the goofy dorks who like to brag that they write Wikipedia articles.
The 10Gbps spec is just a theoretical interface speed that no real-world consumer device will ever even get close.
Just like you are offered a Ferrari with 320 Km/h top speed in order to cut your commuting time to your office in your small village from 10 minutes walking to 10 seconds driving. Will not happened.
Try to move several thousands files from your USB 2.0 external drive to your i7 computer, and you might see no more than 10% utilization of the USB 2.0 theoretical transfer speed of 480Mbps.
And even with single file copy, Thunderbold interface will wait most of the time on the cheap internal electronics of the drive to provide the data.
A typical button is a rectangle or rounded rectangle, wider than it is tall, with a descriptive caption in its center. The most common method of pressing a button is clicking it with a pointer controlled by a mouse, but other input such as keystrokes can be used to execute the command of a button.
Some very common incarnations of the button widget are:
A Close button for closing windows or programs.
So I'm thinking of all the real-world scenarios where being able to read all of my data off a drive quickly is a _problem_.
There is a two drive raid setup that will be sold, not the most exciting news but useful enough to the people interested in such things.
So what do you do to jazz up your otherwise dull article, you create an issue eluding to an eight minutes copy time not being long enough for some undefined and illogical reason.
Please do explain why a reduced capacity to transfer speed ratio makes it seem like a small drive and exactly how long you'd like it to take to copy.
If we throttled transfers down to 1Mbp/s would that make it seem like a really really big drive to you, would that make you all warm and happy?
"Gbps" - let me get the bag, I have to vomit.
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/units.html
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
... You could have a gigantic ruggedized box o'SSDs with a handle and a Thunderbolt port for on-location work, then plug it into whichever editing suite hardware you have. Alternatively, since you can have optical transceiver adapters, you _could_ have Tbolt fiber all over the place if you really wanted to.