Akitio Builds World's First Bus-powered Thunderbolt SSD

[N.Broekhuijsen]

Akitio has announced its fully thunderbolt-powered external SSD.

Akitio Builds World's First Bus-powered Thunderbolt SSD : Read more

 

[therogerwilco]

too expensive

 

[nebun]

a little expensive if you ask me

 

[ordos96]

LaCie already has a drive with a thunderbolt port that doesn't need an external power supply. Not sure what exactly they think they have the first of....

 

[Brian Schonewille]

Yes, please charge me an absurd amounts of money for a port that no one uses barely. I wonder if you could just buy a cheap thunderbolt enclosure and slap your own ssd it... wait nothing to do with thunderbolt is cheap.

 

[stevejnb]

While I think Thunderbolt is more or less a waste of time the price doesn't seem as outrageous as some people would suggest. Can anyone show me some 512gb USB SSD drives that don't require an external power supply for under $600? I suspect they are out there, but I'm betting you don't get them for under $400, possibly much under $500. If you can find me such a drive, thanks - I need to go get my credit card...

 

[WyomingKnott]

I'm going to disagree with all of the above. A common high-speed bus for most peripherals is an important thing to have. First products are bound to be expensive.

At some point in the future, perhaps instead of ten cables from my computer to my stuff, they can all be on one hub or daisy-chain. It would be nice.

 

[lp231]

Thunderbolt is a fad technology. It's not widely adopted because it's too expensive and USB 3 can take care of thing just at good as Thunderbolt.
Thunderbolt is like Firewire 800 of today.

 

[rohitbaran]

Thunderbolt is something I don't like to prosper, since it is a proprietary technology from Intel. Unless they open it, it will be always expensive and any products using it will be expensive too. USB should remain dominant or we will have to pay big dollar for thunderbolt devices like we overpay for Intel's CPUs due to AMD not having naything good in medium to high end CPU market.

 

[milktea]

... Can anyone show me some 512gb USB SSD drives that don't require an external power supply for under $600? I suspect they are out there, but I'm betting you don't get them for under $400, possibly much under $500. If you can find me such a drive, thanks - I need to go get my credit card...

Samsung 840 EVO 500GB sells for $340 at Amazon (or about $380 at retail stores). The notebook kit even comes with a USB3.0 adapter, so you don't even need to buy a separate enclosure for it (for external use). And it's pretty well respected in terms of performance as well as power consumption (idle & load). I'd say it's mostly on par with the Intel 520s... a bit better than the 520s.
And to iterate, no external power needed with the USB3.0 adapter. It's all bus powered! You can hide/fit the entire drive(7mm)+adapter in your pocket to carry around.

By the way, the 250GB model runs well even on USB2.0 (bus powered). I haven't confirmed USB2 on the 500GB model yet.

 

[stevejnb]

Looks interesting, and I notice they have 750gb drives already. 1tb is the point where I'll seriously start considering buying a SSD (the above comment was a bit of a joke) and I may just hold out for 2tb. I was figuring within the next two years, but, may not even take that long...

That being said, I personally don't trust a drive designed to be used internally as an external drive. A bit part of my reasoning is backup, so I'd prefer a product designed from the get-go to be outside of a computer. Though, I suppose a good enclosure would solve that problem.

 

[mrmez]

What's so outrageous about the price?
A good 512Gb SSD will run ~$500AUD. Add a nice enclosure for ~$100 and you're there.

I don't know thunderbolt specs, but given that SSDs can draw much less power than a mech hdd, I'm surprised it took so long.

As for the drive and thunderbolt being useless... to each their own. Everyone uses their system differently. I'm currently on a 2009 iMac. According to that logic, everyone needs exactly what I have, no less, no more.

 

[mynith]

Me, personally, if a product for Apple users says "up to 500 MB/s" I read "definitely less than 500 MB/s". So it has extremely fast transfer speeds that are still well within the limits of (e)SATAIII and USB 3.0. Good job.