The release of this new I/O connection is actually amazing. For those of you that don’t know what I/O means, it simply means input/output. It’s a connection that allows for the transfer of data in and out of that connection. I haven’t read much about Thunderbolt yet, but there are two things that stick out to me.
First, the transfer speed. Thunderbolt transfers data at 10Gbps. To put that into perspective, Firewire800 transfers data at .8Gbps (800Mbps) and eSATA transfers data at 3Gbps. Also, when using Firewire800, in my experience it takes about 1 hour to transfer 60GB of data from one hard drive to another. Theoretically, Thunderbolt will be over 10 times faster, transferring that same 60GB in 6 minutes, or 600GB in an hour. That’s ridonkulous.
The second thing that I’m loving is Thunderbolt is available built in to the new Macbook Pro. That’s the reason why I never got eSATA. To utilize eSATA, I had to buy a third party adapter or PCIe card, and I just never got around to it because it wasn’t THAT important to me. But now it’s no sweat.
What all this means for the editor is you should have no problem working with the video codecs of higher bit-rates so long as your storage device can read the data fast enough (aka you still need a RAID). This must be why the new 12-core Mac Pros that were released months ago didn’t have USB3.0
