Apple Compatible ThunderBolt SSD 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.

Shipping soon: The first SSD ThunderBolt drive is expected to be LaCie's Little Big Disk ThunderBolt model. Announced along with the first ThunderBolt port MacBook's, were still waiting for this dual-drive Solid-State Thunder-Bolt RAID offering from LaCie.

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. So that's likely to slow product releases, and require 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.

SSD ThunderBolt Backup 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.

The evolution and advancement of the Serial-ATA drive interface specification to SATA III is also crucial for SSD ThunderBolt peak Read and Write speeds. The new 6GBps SATA III spec doubles the currently 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 newer solid-state drives are capable of transferring data (both Reads and Writes) faster than the SATA II spec allows. So expect ThunderBolt SSD drive makers to use and leverage the performance of recently introduced SATA III flash memory drives from OCZ, Intel, Crucial, and others.

LaCie's Little Big Disk ThunderBolt Drives are trickling on the market. Demos shown at MacWorld and CES in Las Vegas were using a pair of 250GB Intel 510-Series drives in a striped RAID 0 configuration to show off the sheer speed of ThunderBolt interface - and the capabilities of Intel's most advanced Solid-State disks ever offered. The first shipping model is more modest: The 240GB drive using two 120GB SSDs is priced at $899.

Fastest SSD Drives Made - To Date

Internal SSD drive upgrades to match an external ThunderBolt drive's potential.

           

OCZ's FASTEST SSD Ever	New Intel 510 Series	SATA 3 6GBps Interface
Top Performing SSD OCZ's Best Drive Yet	Intel SATA III SSD Excellent Mac Choice	Crucial M4 Drive SATA 3 400+MB/s Reads

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.

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