Intel Shows Off Prototype Thunderbolt Thumb Drive

[Sin]

On Thursday at Computex, Intel unveiled a prototype thumb drive which employs the Thunderbolt interface and claims data transfer speeds of up to 10 Gbps. Dubbed the "world's fastest thumb drive," Intel's prototype device boasts transfer speeds far beyond those reachable by established standards such as the omnipresent USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 devices, of which the latter attains a theoretical maximum transfer speed of 5 Gbps.

The small drive hosts a 128 GB SanDisk SSD and connects directly to a Thunderbolt port on your PC or laptop, dismissing the need for the usually expensive cables associated with Thunderbolt peripherals, typically external storage solutions but also monitors. Thunderbolt hasn't seen wide adoption yet, primarily because of high costs, both implementation costs (expensive controllers) as well as adoption costs (few and expensive compatible devices). However that could soon change, seeing how many motherboards that offer Thunderbolt support were unveiled only in the last few days at Computex, one would think that Intel's Haswell platform could accelerate Thunderbolt adoption despite lacking native chipset support for the standard.



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[Frick]

When we see TB actually used outside Mac's and a tiny tiny group of motherboards this might come in handy.

 

[Mindweaver]

how big is that person's hand? That is a huge drive.. It looks powder coated..

 

[sc]

I rather have them make external Thunderbolt enclosures for GPUs to use with their Ultrabooks than useless flash drives.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

Does it start your car too? Looks very like a car key.

 

[natr0n]

looks like a hacked up epoxy model

 

[newtekie1]

The only reason I have a flash drive is so that I can plug it into every computer I come across if I need to. A TB flash drive, even if it is marginally faster than a USB3.0 flash drive, is pretty much useless.

 

[Geofrancis]

The thunder bolt will end up like firewire, on every motherboard but no hardware to connect other than a handful of specialist devices.

 

[McSteel]

Well, for starters Intel (and Apple!) could (should) absorb some of the cost of wide adaptation, by including native support in Intel's own chipsets, and selling the controllers to 3rd party for the same (or lower) price USB3 goes for. If this doesn't happen very soon, TB is well on it's way to becoming the new FW 800.

 

[Roph]

 

[Geofrancis]

They should be spending their efforts into making an external GPU enclosure for laptops this is the first interface other than express card to come close with bandwidth and latency.

 

[Frick]

http://i.imgur.com/nHE47E8.jpg

Which is sad because it has some nice stuff. Universal laptop docks for instance would be a very good thing.

But the new firewire indeed..

 

[scoutingwraith]

Until every major computer company includes it their laptops,desktops,all in one computers and advertiser new flash products it will not pick up at all like Firewire because the average consumer wouldnt really care since they want something they can plug in anywhere universally and transfer files.

 

[NdMk2o1o]

http://i.imgur.com/nHE47E8.jpg

Fetch picture

(have to have seen mean girls to understand )

 

[Prima.Vera]

What is the performance of that drive? USB 3.0 can go to 600MB/s with no problem, and the interface is the cheapest.

 

[de.das.dude]

useless.

 

[Geofrancis]

Which is sad because it has some nice stuff. Universal laptop docks for instance would be a very good thing.

But the new firewire indeed..

Yea a nice dock with a graphics card would be the business.

 

[Athlonite]

useless.

qft