Thunderbolt is a technology co-developed by Intel and Apple that will provide users with faster read/write speeds. At the moment Thunderbolt technology is being utilized by Apple in their series of Mac computers, but unfortunately due to the lack of Thunderbolt peripherals, the standard has not taken off in the way that Intel had originally envisioned. It looks like that may change as Intel has announced their goal of at least 100 Thunderbolt peripherals being made available by the end of the year. This is a huge increase over the handful of Thunderbolt peripherals currently available in the market, and this includes LaCie’s series of Thunderbolt external hard drives.
While Thunderbolt certainly has the potential to provide extremely fast read/write speeds of up to 10Gbps (a lot faster compared to USB 3.0), the expensive nature of Thunderbolt peripherals has deterred regular users from purchasing them for use as backup devices. Would the introduction of more Thunderbolt peripherals in the market drive the prices down? Simple economics would say yes, but exactly how much cheaper can they get? We guess we will have to wait and see.
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