Buying a Thunderbolt Hard Drive? The Top 8 Things you should know

If you’re considering jumping on the new Thunderbolt Hard Drive bandwagon, there are a few things you should know before you jump on board. Here’s a list of tips from the experts:

1. Early Adoption – Any time you buy the newest piece of technology you can bet your last dollar (if you didn’t spend it already on that HD-DVD player) that next year there’s going to be something better, bigger, and faster for the same price as you’ll pay at launch. If you’re buying as a professional, thing about how much time this device will save you and do the math. If you’re buying as a hobby, think about how many dollars you’re willing to spend to get to play this cool piece of tech.

2. New Standards – Any time a new standard comes out, there’s always going to be a debate and ensuing war about which piece of new technology out there is going to win. In the case of Thunderbolt (Code Named: Intel Light Peak) the battle will be against USB 3.0. USB 3.0 supports speeds of up to 3 Gbps, which is a fraction of what Thunderbolt supports at 10Gbps, but the USB technology including its 2.0 predecessor has long been the standard. When you’re buying that new gadget think not only about whether your existing PCs will be able to use it, but also about how likely the new PC you buy in 3 years time will be to continue on having support for that port. Right now Thunderbolt is only going to work on a brand new (5 months or new at this time of writing) MacBook or iMac.

3. Do you need it? – If you’re looking at transferring at these ultra high speeds, you should think about whether or not you are actually using all of the capacity in your existing external hard drive. Does you machine already have a super fast internal Solid State Drive (SSD) disk that can even supply the data to the external Thunderbolt drive fast enough? I/O speed has improved so dramatically over the last few years it’s becoming less and less of a bottleneck.

4. Cables, cables, cables – Remember when you bought that brand new high definition television and the HD-DVD player over Bluray? They told you at the store there was no point buying this cool gear and then using a crummy old composite cable. You had to buy a very expensive HDMI cable. Like HDMI cables, Thunderbolt Cables are sure to come down in price over time, but indeed it is going to take some time to make it happen. Bank on spending some extra money on special cables to support your new technology.

5. That Disk Spins Round – Don’t cash out for a Thunderbolt Hard Drive with a spinning disk. Even a high end 7200 RPM SATA drive isn’t able to keep up the pace with your new ThunderBolt port. To try to lower the price point and meet the increasing storage wants of users some manufacturers are already releasing plans out there to put spinning drives in Thunderbolt enclosures. Don’t waste your money on these, they can’t keep up the pace.

6. SSD – Solid State Drives are a must when purchasing a Thunderbolt Hard Driveenclosure, but a few things to keep in mind if you haven’t purchased solid state drives before. While it’s common place now to be able to pick up a 3TB SATA drive for cheap, often under $150. For the same price you’d be looking at only about a 128GB or 164GB solid state disk. These SSD’s are finally getting to the mainstream consumer and expect prices to drop over the next year further, however capacities will remain lower for quite some time compared to the classic 7200RPM SATA drives.

7. Connections Pushing Daisys – Daisy chains that is, right now since the Thunderbolt port on most computers is doing double duty as an external display port, you’re going to be plugging your device in between your monitor and main Thunderbolt Port. This means connecting and disconnecting devices can take a little bit of re-wiring unless you have a new display with a built in Thunderbolt port replicator. Keep in mind like when USB first emerged you’re likely only going to have a single port, and initially USB was designed to run along a daisy chain as well. Thunderbolt today as we know it is limited to a daisy chain of up to seven devices.

8. Uses – Do you have a good reason to use Thunderbolt? Make sure if you’re trying to solve a problem you’re going about solving it the right way. For most slow downs, there’s a good chance that using a Thunderbolt drive isn’t going to turn your wait from minutes to seconds. There are a lot of good use cases for Thunderbolt, like movie editing and other extremely high I/O intensive tasks, but if you’re looking to archive your DVD collection more quickly then make sure you do the research before you pull out your credit cards.

These tips and others are brought to you by the experts – see lots of other valuable tips about your Thunderbolt Hard Drive at their website.