A few of my staff have been inquiring about getting upgrades to their MacPros some time in the next few months, considering that Apple is adding Thunderbolt ports to the MBP which would suggest forthcoming Lightpeak external drives and hardware updates for the MacPros as well.

I recently upgraded several windows machines to USB 3.0 and eSATA - is Thunderbolt/Lightpeak going to make USB 3.0 and eSATA obsolete?

*checks magic eight ball*

Outlook not clear...

I've never even heard of it before. USB bandwidth is not really that important for most devices, and eSATA is basically the same speed as a SATA device connected directly to the motherboard.

Intel and Apple will announce this tech today.

eSATA and USB 3.0 have been great time savers on our editing workstations because we have to work with third party external drives a lot.

When a big part of your business tied up transfering hundreds of GB worth of large video files back and forth all day, it makes a huge difference.

Not really useful for most home users, I don't think USB/eSATA are going to obsolete for quite some time. If anything it may be just another extra port, not a replacement.

The one thing about Lightpeak is it promises the ability to finally unify all the different connections on the computer to a single standard -- a universal port that to me, is most welcome.

It's definitely leaps and bounds better than eSATA, and given the slow adoption of USB 3.0, it has the chance to become the de facto standard if Intel does it right and fast enough.

I've been Interested in lightpeak since I first read about it in October/November.



USB I don't see going anywhere any time soon, but eSATA I can see gone in a year's time.


Some things to consider:

Intel "supports" USB 3.0, but Light Peak definitely has a much higher priority. Their "support" as far as released hardware for USB 3.0 is often cited as one of the reasons for it's slow adoption

Light Peak is twice as fast as USB 3.0, making it also faster than SATA

Light Peak already has specifications and implementations to replace HDMI

A world with computers having only a single port would be amazing. Just think of how much easier cable management would be if internal device ports and external device ports were the same. I mean just having external device ports the same would be a godsend.

Intel had to switch to using copper instead of fiber optic for the first gen of lightpeak, but they said it had no impact on speed, which I really find hard to believe. Also, fiber optic for this kind of use seems like a terrible idea, since you get data loss if it isn't virtually straight.

I like the idea that there will be little pop-in adapters for eSATA, Firewire800, etc., probably USB 3.0 adapters.

We receive all manner of external drives containing third party assets that we have to work with, it would be nice to be able to plug an adapter in without installing a new PCI-e card every time there is a new tech.

Why on earth would you want those?

- Using an adapter to plug a LightPeak device into a USB port will give you USB speeds -- Since LightPeak will be a premium offering, save yourself the money and just get the USB cable, or if you want the speeds -- upgrade!

- Using an adapter to plug a USB device into a LightPeak port will give you USB speeds -- Either upgrade to LightPeak to make use of the speeds or use a USB port.

When you adopt a technology -- FULLY adopt it, don't go half-way otherwise you are just giving yourself a headache in the long run (as well as spending more money in the long-run)*


*that said, I have lots of legacy ports and related cables for various peripherals, but that's because they come in handy from time to time and are the result of me not throwing away stuff when upgrading.

Bear in mind that there are bottlenecks which stem from other hardware. That's probably what they mean: there's no point in them upping the price for a speed boost when other hardware won't take advantage of it for years. This way its still pretty damn fast, keeping costs down helps with adoption, and it gives them a little more time to make absolutely sure that the FO stuff is good to go.

I was referring to USB 3.0 and eSATA adapters. Not USB 2.0 adapters.

USB 3.0 and eSATA are already multiples faster than the read/write speeds of most external drives. This means if I receive a 3rd party drive and need to transfer data to a workstation, whether I use Lightpeak or Lightpeak + USB 3.0 adapter, for example, the transfer speed should be exactly the same. It is only limited by the sequential read speed of the external drive.

USB 3.0 can transfer data bi-directional at around 5 Gb/s (roughly 625 MB/sec)

This first generation of Lightpeak maxes out at around 10 Gb/s (10 Gigbits is roughly equal to 1.2 GigaBytes / sec)

Most 7200RPM external drives can only perform sequential reads somewhere between 80-100MegaBytes/sec, no matter how fast the transfer mechanism. The drive read/write speed is the bottleneck, even most SSD external drives only get up to 200-300MB/sec, less than half the max transfer speed of USB 3.0.

If a Lightpeak port means in the future instead of buying new hardware for USB 4.0, or eSATA 2.0 or 3.0, or whatever new tech comes along, for a while at least, we would be able to get by with using an adapter on the Lightpeak port then color me interested.

Where it could be most helpful, however, is with some of our SSD Raid storage.

Here is a demo of someone streaming 4 x 1080p video clips simultaneously over lightpeak at 700MB/s

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/02/25/notes-of-interest-on-thunderbolt-and-macbook-pro/

And as I said: USB 3.0 support is barely existant, largely due to Intel not backing it. eSATA was a hackjob and only existed due to how slow USB 2.0 is. It'll be dropped like a bag of bricks soon, at least that's my prediction. When you buy devices, you can very easily pick-and-choose the connection type, so just choose the proper connection that your PC supports. This is why adapters are stupid and a waste of money, just be a smarter consumer. The only time you should ever use an adapter is when using old stuff on your new rig.


I am well aware of the difference between a bit, and a byte, as well a the SI prefixes and the IEC prefixes


This is silly, and exactly the opposite of what Intel plans on doing with this technology. Talking about USB 4.0 when USB 3.0 isn't even really widespread. Likewise, eSATA never saw even the market penetration of Firewire, due to fracturing itself with eSATA and eSATAp. AFAIK, no plans on further development of eSATA is being worked on (as I said, it was a hackjob to increase the speed of connection to external devices, which USB 3.0 and LightPeak solved). In the long-run Intel plans on pushing for LightPeak replacing most other ports, hence it will do the exact opposite of what you are talking about: you have only one port type and that is LightPeak (instead of the current state of USB, FireWire, and eSATA on the outside and SATA on the inside, both inside and outside will be LightPeak).

Also: RAID (Hardware RAID at least) has no place in the consumer market IMO.