How To Beat Watson on Jeopardy [Humor]

Add comment February 24th, 2011 Logrithmic

Intel’s Thunderbolt vs USB 3.0 [SSD]

We’ve been hearing about this Thunderbolt all week. What is it? I wish I was talking about the new 4G HTC Android phone but I am not. Today, Intel announced Thunderbolt, the next step up in peripheral speed connection. How boring, you say? Very. However, as an avid video editor and blu-ray ripper this is the logical next step to be taken.

In 2009, Intel demoed Thunderbolt (then called Light Peak) by ripping a blu-ray in 30 seconds. Thunderbolt does 10gbps. This is ample bandwidth for editing HD and 4K footage off an external drive. For the past year I’ve used USB 3.0 connections to edit HD footage. USB 3.0 does 5gbps. View the chart below:

The thing is, I edit off a fast SSD drive and even that won’t fully utilize a 10gbps highway. For now, Thunderbolt is more valuable for things like displays. Thunderbolt’s dual channel bandwidth allows for better daisy chaining bandwidth. LaCie, Western Digital, and Promise Tech., among others have signed on to bring Thunderbolt to their peripherals later this year but these drives will need to be at least solid state. Promise Tech. has an awesome NAS available now called the Pegasus and Nikon may have Thunderbolt built in to it’s next DSLR. Nice move!

Add comment February 24th, 2011 Logrithmic