The Thunderbolt storage roundup from IBC 2012

fcp.co

There is Thunderbolt everywhere at IBC 2012 and we thought we would look at the storage vendors that are relevant to the Final Cut Pro market and catch up on new models, new capacities, new speeds and even a skydiver dropping a unit mid dive too.

We will start with LaCie who were exhibiting updated versions of their very desirable Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series. We have seen these drives before and lusted after them before! On the stand they had two SSD drives daisy chained together to achieve a read speed of over 1000 MBs. Because the model features dual Thunderbolt ports, you can loop them together or pass through to other peripherals such as I/O boxes or monitors. The new 512GB SATA III SSD will retail at approximately €700 and the 1TB model at €1500. Both models will be available late September/early November. We like, a lot.

ATTO have the same idea and their ThunderLink & ThunderStream products. Thunderlink will convert a 8Gb/s Fibre Channel connection to Thunderbolt making it one of the easiest ways to get a Thunderbolt MacBook Pro or iMac connected to an existing fibre channel based SAN. The unit will take copper or optical fibre connectors, automatically negotiate 8Gb, 4Gb and 2Gb devices and work with most configurations such as arbitrated loop, point to point and direct fabric/switch attached. ThunderLink can also convert Thunderbolt to 10GB Ethernet or 6 GB SAS/SATA, but you'll need one box per type of connection. read more...