Solid-State ThunderBolt SSD Disk Drives For Mac

External ThunderBolt Port SSD External Drives for Mac Backup

Apple Compatible ThunderBolt SSD Drives

ThunderBolt SSD External Drive From ElGato

120GB & 230GB Drives

Looking for the fastest ThunderBolt Solid-State drive solution? A Mac compatible ThunderBolt SSD drive has distinct flash memory speed advantages. Especially when SSD drives are paired in RAID 0 configurations, Intel and Apple ThunderBolt drives can achieve the fastest data transfer rates Mac owners have ever experienced.

With Apple's introduction of ThunderBolt ports in the first MacBook Pro models, they've continued with TBolt support in additional product refreshes throughout the year.

The first shipping ThunderBolt drive for Mac has been Promise Technologies Pegasus RAID family. But that uses 4 or 6 traditional spinning platter drives in RAID configurations. It's performance IS impressve - considering they're using conventional 3.5" hard drive mechanisms.

The first SSD ThunderBolt drive is LaCie's Little Big Disk ThunderBolt model. Announced along with the first ThunderBolt port MacBook's this dual-drive Solid-State Thunder-Bolt RAID offering from LaCie offers 240 GB of storage. Recently, ElGato has begun shipping it's single SSD drives in 240 and 120GB capacities.

Intel still tighly controls much of the intellectual property and patents for LightPeak - ThunderBolt. Currently they're the only manufacturer of the ThunderBolt chipset need to make TBolt drives and disk enclosures. Being the sole supplier has led to slow product releases, and requires 3rd party computer peripheral and external drive makers to pony up and pay a premium to get access to ThunderBolt chips and product development support.

ThunderBolt External SSD Drives For Mac

ThunderBolt technology and flash-memory based SSD external drives are a perfect match for the impressive data transfer rates of Intel and Apple's ThunderBolt ports. Solid-State external drive technology using ThunderBolt utterly redefines the performance of Mac external hard drive storage. With potentially 10GBps peak speeds on each of it's dual channels, flash memory drives are really the best technology currently available to even begin to exploit all the bandwidth TBolt offers.

External SSD For Mac

256GB USB3 + ThunderBolt SSD

The Little Big Disk LaCie 512GB Thunderbolt SSD uses a pair of 256GB SSD drives in a striped RAID 0 configuration to maximize the sheer speed of ThunderBolt interface. The 120GB and 240GB versions of Elgato Thunderbolt Solid State Drive is a single-drive solution at more affordable prices.

The evolution of the Serial-ATA drive interface specification to SATA III has been crucial for SSD ThunderBolt drives achieving peak Read and Write speeds. The 6GBps SATA III spec doubles the recently dominant 3GBps SATA II drive specification. So the latest crop of SATA 3 SSD drives are able to meet the demands of ThunderBolt. The timing is perfect. The newest solid-state drives are capable of transferring data (both Reads and Writes) faster than the SATA II spec allows. ThunderBolt SSD drive makers are leveraging the performance of recently introduced SATA III flash memory drives from OCZ, Intel, Crucial, Patriot and others.

To truly get the most of an Apple ThunderBolt SSD external drive - you need to have a fast SSD in your MacBook or Macintosh desktop system to even begin to match an external ThunderBolt port drive's capabilities. If your Mac didn't come with one, the above recommended SSD internal drive upgrades for Mac are all bleeding-edge, current generation solid-state drives.