It’s taken a while, but it seems that the dried up tear-duct that was the supply of Thunderbolt accessories is about to turn into a torrent of high-speed, daisy-chainable tears of relief. Hard drive supremo LaCie will at last sell you a 2big Thunderbolt Series external drive.
Up until now, the Thunderbolt port on your MacBook has been useful for two things: plugging in an external display and… OK, it’s been useful for just one thing. Now you can hook up an ultrafast external drive which will shuttle data around at up to 327MB/s. That’s megabytes, not megabits.
The 2big’s sleek aluminum shell holds either 4TB or 6TB worth of drives, which can be used normally or in a RAID configuration, and as you’d expect from a Thunderbolt peripheral, it has another port around the back to daisy-chain other peripherals. This pass-through works even when the drive is powered down.
It’s about time. Thunderbolt is as fast as hooking components up inside the computer, and as such makes a MacBook almost as expandable as a Mac Pro. It might also make it as expensive: the 4TB LaCie costs $650, while the 6TB runs to $800.
[Thanks, Kristin H!]
