Unfortunately, at least for single drives, there aren't many choices of standlalone Thunderbolt drive enclosures available. Akitio has delivered a nice range of standalone Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2 and 3 drive enclosures for homebuilt storage solutions using the SSD or HDD drives of your choice.Īlot of folks want to cobble their own Thunderbolt data backup drive together with the HDD or SSD drive of their choosing.
Introducing a single-port Thunderbolt portable SSD drive like the Neutrino shown here (using an Intel OEM SSD) is the first step in recouping their investment, a 256Gb is available as well (using a SanDisk OEM SSD). They've long been a maker of USB, eSata, and FireWire drive enclosures for assembling DIY backup drives. One of the notably rising entrants into the external SSD drive market is Akitio who was recently acquired by OWC. To get dual, pass-through ports, you generally have to move up to the multi-drive RAID array type of Thunderbolt data storage products. These laptop-size affordable consumer drives have a single Thunderbolt port for use directly connected to your computer - or at the END of the device chain. Major brands include Akitio, G-Technology, SiliconPower, Monster Digital, OWC and LaCie external Thunderbolt SSD backup drive offerings shown above. Who Manufactures Thunderbolt Backup Peripherals?
In fact, Thunderbolt 3 incorporates SuperSpeed+ USB 3.1 10Gbps protocols so that either Thunderbolt or USB-C peripherals can be used on a modern Windows or Mac computer's Thunderbolt 3 port. The new 40Gbps Thunderbolt 3 spec has adopted the smaller and more widely used Type-C USB 3.1 connector. In the 2020's we now have 3 generations of Thunderbolt: The original 10Gbps TBolt and 2nd generation 20Gbps Thunderbolt 2 using the mini DisplayPort interface. Shopping For TunderBolt External SSD Drives
A PC or Mac compatible Thunderbolt SSD external backup drive can really leverage the potential bandwidth available for the fastest data backups and file transfers you'll ever experience.įYI: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases So, solid-state flash memory disk drives are the most logical pairing of the two technologies. Conventional hard drives can't fill a fraction of Thunderbolt's data pipeline. Thunderbolt outstrips the bandwidth requirements of nearly any single personal computer peripheral available today. Minimally TWENTY times faster than the popular USB 2.0 spec, and double that of the competing 5Gbps USB 3.0 SuperSpeed standard,
mp3 files in 9 seconds, a 22GB HD movie in 65 seconds and a 5GB SD movie in 16 seconds.Shopping for a ultra-fast PC or Mac compatible Thunderbolt SSD storage solution? Never before has a personal computer interface offered the insanely fast data transfer speeds of the original 10Gbps Thunderbolt, 2nd-generation 20Gbps Thunderbolt 2 drives, and 3rd-generation 40Gbps Thunderbolt 3 storage.
WD's own My Book Thunderbolt Duo, which uses the two Caviar Green internal drives, has read/write speeds of 244MB/sec and 235MB/sec, respectively.Īccording to San Jose, using the Thunderbolt ports, the VelociRaptor Duo can transfer 2,000 5MB. "We haven't seen performance like this in the hard drive industry pretty much until now."īy comparison, the 1TB OCZ Octane SSD sports a top speed of 460MB/sec for data reads and 330MB/sec for writes. "You can daisy chain two VelociRaptor Duos together, giving you 800MB/sec for reads and 760MB/sec for writes," San Jose said. WD's My Book VelociRaptor Drive daisy-chained to other hard drives using the Thunderbolt port specification
The My Book VelociRaptor Duo has a maximum performance of 400MB/sec for reads and 380MB/sec for writes, but because of its Thunderbolt ports, it can be daisy-chained with additional external drives to increase its performance. However, the VelociRaptor Duo does more than halve the price of capacity compared with a larger SSD, and 1TB SSDs are far and few between the ones that are available, such as OCZ's Octane, cost more than $2,400.
In reality, some lower-capacity SSDs have fallen below $1 per gigabyte.