Thunderbolt is fascinating from a technological perspective but faces several uphill challenges to widespread adoption, ones that are highlighted by WD’s first drive to use the connection technology.
The first is price - not only does the native Thunderbolt drive cost more than the equivalent USB or FireWire models, but it doesn’t ship with the $50 cable needed to connect it to a Thunderbolt-enabled PC or Mac.
This cost wouldn’t be as much of an issue if it came with an accompanying boost in performance, but the 10Gbps Thunderbolt speed far outweighs the maximum throughput of the Caviar Green drives within the enclosure. It might make sense if you are trying to manage limited expandability on a laptop, but it becomes an even less viable solution for a PC with Thunderbolt ports sitting right next to USB 3.
This is a great product, but unless you have a burning reason that you must use Thunderbolt, we’d suggest looking into cheaper versions.
Verdict
Need an external storage drive that can transfer data to or from your computer very, very fast?
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