Seagate’s “mysterious” thunderbolt adapter makes an appearance at CES. Well, not for all of the masses to see, but in a private area of the Seagate CES suite at the Vdara (NDA required). NDA or no NDA, I’m going to give it to you straight. Lord knows, I personally have been called to the carpet on as to the reality of the adapter, with deserved questions and concerns as to when it will be available to customers that have made the investment in Seagate GoFlex technology over the past year in hopes that a T-bolt adapter would be made available.
The Seagate Thunderbolt adapter driver is only needed if you are using Backup Plus or GoFlex 3TB or 4TB drives with the Thunderbolt adapter and plan to.
So let’s clear the airthe good, the bad, and the ugly. What took so long? Let’s face it, Thunderbolt is an entirely new interface technology that is much more complicated than the established USB or FireWire standards we are used to. For example, when Seagate embarks on adding a new interface to a hard drive, take SAS for instance, it takes years of development work with standards committees, within Seagate labs, application testing, you name it. Given Thunderbolt is a new interface standard established outside, or independent of Seagate, more complex, and thus more time consuming. It’s harder to do than you might think. When will it really be available for purchase?
The Seagate press release says by the end of March for the portable adapter, and by the second half of the year for the desk variety, but they may be here sooner than we think. GoFlex portable adapter will be available in the next couple weeks, while the GoFlex Desk version will be here sometime in February. What are the specs? GoFlex portable adapter is single port, while the GoFlex Desk version is dual port.
What is the price? GoFlex Portable $100.00, GoFlex Desk $190.00. A far cry from the target $19.99 price we see on the FireWire and USB 3.0 adapterswhy? FireWire and USB controllers are established technology. Thunderbolt is still considered new technology, so the controllers demand a high price, and thus driving the price of the Seagate adapters upward.
As the technology matures, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that the adapters will reach the pricing of a standard USB or FireWire adapter. Even at $100 and $190, Seagate’s solution, though it is single drive, is one of the more affordable Thunderbolt solutions available. Does it include a Thunderbolt cable?
Apple is the only provider of Thunderbolt cables ($50.00). Seagate is working on their own cable solution, but at this point, Apple is the only name in town. So, the good, the adapters will be available this month. The bad, the complexity of the interface caused delays in getting these things out to the market, and the adapters do not include a Thunderbolt cable. And, the uglyit all depends on how you look at it. Compared to USB and Firewire, the price is high, but compared to other Thunderbolt solutions, it’s not that bad.
Not exactly everything you wanted to hear, but at least it’s real progress, and not just words on a screen. As always, comments are always welcomegood, bad, and plain old ugly. I don’t believe that any GoFlex drives will come with the Thunderbolt adapters.
I’ve read that the portable GoFlex Thunderbolt adapters will cost around $100, and the GoFlex Desk Thunderbolt adapters will cost around $190 sold separately. I doubt that Seagate and retailers want to sell a drive with a Thunderbolt adapter for a big price together. The prices for Seagate’s GoFlex drives have increased significantly since the holidays, and even since June 2011, when I bought my Seagate GoFlex Desk Drive. If you have immediate need for drives, I guess that now is the time for buy. If there is no immediate need, I would wait for the next sale, and to keep checking the big name online retailers.
I’ve read that Seagate has said that Thunderbolt is offering speeds of two to three times the speed of FW800 (800Mbps). I’m using a Mid-2011 iMac with transfer speed of 6Gbps.
My 1TB Seagate GoFlex Desk drive also offers transfer speeds of 6Gbps. It seems to me that the Thunderbolt adapter should allow me to achieve transfer speeds of 6Gbps, which is 7.5x the speed of FW800’s 800Mbps. Please let me know what should be expected, in specific terms, with regard to the transfer speeds, using the Thunderbolt adapter with the hardware that I have specified. Well, I did some checking on things over the weekend.
Apple issued a Firmware update for the 2011 iMacs in May, 2011, that updates the internal SATA port to SATA 3, at 6Gb/s. But, and this is a big but, the internal HD is a SATA 2 HD, which has a transfer speed of 3Gb/s. I’m bothered that Apple had already been promoting Thunderbolt, but they have been limiting transfer speeds by putting the bottleneck at their internal hard drives. I bought a Seagate GoFlex desk drive in June, 2011. I have been assuming that it has transfer speeds of 6Gb/s.
But I haven’t found whether the GoFlex desk drives have SATA 2 or SATA 3 drives in them. And I’m reluctant to open mine to find out, since it’s got about another 1 1/2 years of warranty remaining. If anyone (Mark) knows for sure if the GoFlex desk drives have been using SATA 2 or SATA 3 drives, I would appreciate knowing the answer.
I will make an effort to stop by the Apple store near me in the near future to see if Apple has made the change to SATA 3 drives in iMacs. @Woj The 2-3x improvement at 175MB – 205MB/s sounds like the limit of a spinning hard drive. Were you using a spinning hard drive for that test? Also this brings up the question of whether SSD will become available, if they’re not already, for the GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter. I’m still keen to have my external (spinning) drives run as fast as my internal (spinning) one, so I’ll be interested in Thunderbolt for that purpose, even if it is a bit pricey. Still, the promise of being able to add an SSD later to the external Thunderbolt adapter for further performance improvements, could be a sweetener, to take the bitterness out of the price of the adapter. Just an FYI that many of us trying to use a SSD drive in a goflex enclosure with the Seagate STAE 121 Thunderbolt Adapter have run into a problem where the Adapter and Drives disconnect constantly from the Mac under moderate load such as copying files.
This seems to be prevalent with SSD drives rather than spinning drives, though spinning drives also have the same problem under heavier loads. SSD were tested with and without TRIM enabled. Different brands/sizes of SSD were tested and all have the same problems (Crucial M4, Samsung 830, OWC). Seagate apparently made aware of the issues with the adapter both by users and other manufacturers but no resolution yet. Hopefully the adapter is capable of having its firmware user upgradeable.
Takeda, Welcome to the forum! Sorry to hear you are having trouble with your Seagate Thunderbolt device and the W540 ThinkPad. From what I understand, the device may be certfied for PC (Windows) or MAC use. You might check your particular model to ensure it is the Windows variant. I would also check our support site for the lattest Lenovo Thunderbolt driver - it can be found under the W540 system, under the video section. We have Windows 7 32 and 64 bit versions. Here is the Here is the Perhaps installing the appropriate Lenovo driver will get this working - let's try that first.