We dig into the GTech GDrive Mobile ... and watch WORST tear-down vid OF ALL TIME

Enticing

Is there something about Thunderbolt and pricing that you find particularly un-enticing, or do you habitually share your views about articles you find inapplicable?

I quite like the idea of signing onto a "Dancing with the Stars" board, and contributing "Didn't watch that episode" to every discussion, but it might eat into my day a bit.

Thunderbolt makes much more sense when you are using SSDs or arrays - it's technically superior to USB 3 but it's not cost competitive for low end devices.

Re: Thunderbolt

In my case, Thunderbolt could be useful. The huge HP laptop I have does have a ESATA port, but the Macbook pro does not, so a SATA interface doesn't help there.

However, the problem with this device is having to UNPLUG the monitor to use it. FAIL, fail and fail again. If I have to choose between monitor and external disk, monitor wins every time.

Re: Benchmarks show it's pointless

Very happy to be corrected on this but isn't it the WAY data is transferred that is the difference? I tried using a USB3 drive with Final Cut Pro and FCP was not happy.

However, an external Firewire 800 drive + FCP and all's well. On paper, FW800 is a hell of a lot slower than USB3. They are different technologies designed for different uses.

Re: I have a 2011 MacBook Air

Yes it would be much faster than a USB 2 drive but to really see a big difference pair it with a SSD drive.

Re: Seagate Go-Flex

I have a couple of them and swap between Firewire 800 and USB 3 adapters as appropriate. I don't have anything to plug a thunderbolt adapter into, as my MacBook is the one that is Mini-Display port only with no Thunderbolt capabilities.

When I'm next in the market for an external drive, it will probably be another Go-Flex.

Re: What I don't understand is why bother?

Thunderbolt does for PCI Express and DisplayPort buses what eSATA does for SATA: It's basically PCIe and DisplayPort on a wire, so you no longer need to provide space inside a computer's case for traditional expansion slots. (Hence the recent Mac Pro redesign.)

For external storage, PCIe offers another advantage: it operates entirely independently of the CPU. USB keeps its price low by making the CPU to do much of the heavy lifting, taking valuable processing power away from your applications.

What the benchmarks in the article don't show – and they should – is the additional processing overheads imposed by using USB. Yes: the raw speed looks identical, but if you're having to give up a CPU core to achieve it, it's going to brutally hammer the performance of any high-end video editing suite you're using at the same time. Even Aperture and Lightroom will be noticeably more sluggish.

Trust me: if you're working in a field where processing large lumps of media is a core activity, you will care about this. It's why Apple redesigned their Mac Pros the way they did: that machine has the equivalent of 18 PCIe expansion slots. (Or 15 + 3 x 4K displays if you prefer.) All that's changed is that those slots are now on the outside of the machine, allowing the engineers to optimise the hell out of the arrangement of the core components inside the case.

That is what Thunderbolt can do that USB cannot. USB isn't even playing the same game, let alone in the same league.

Thunderbolt comes into its own in the high-end professional markets, where the cost of the actual computer itself is tiny compared to all the storage and other peripherals you need to connect to it. No, most readers here won't need that level of power, but it most definitely has a market.