Up to six Thunderbolt devices can share the same TB port on a host device

Nov 7, 2013 08:46 GMT  ·  By

The Thunderbolt interface is only twice as fast as USB 3.0 right now, but it has a certain other perk that owners may like to take advantage of: daisy-chaining support. Buffalo is betting on it for the SSD-WAT Series.

Thunderbolt was invented by Intel (used to be known as Light Peak) but never really caught on, not with many companies besides Apple anyhow.

Still, when you have those two big names behind you, it's hard to actually crash and burn even if the general public does feel indifferent to you.

Case in point, most Apple products (Mac systems, Macbooks) have Thunderbolt ports, which means there will always be a market for TB accessories.

One accessory has been launched by Buffalo: the SSD-WAT Series, a line of, you guessed it, solid-state drives (the SSD in the name was a rather big giveaway).

The SSD-WAT Series is not actually a solid-state drive, but an aluminum case that holds two SSDs inside, in RAID0.

Altogether, the products measure 154 x 102 x 45 mm / 6.06 x 4.01 x 1.77 inches and weigh 540 grams / 1.19 pounds.

The capacity and associated price list is this: 256 GB (78,015 yen / $790 / €584), 512 GB (111,615 yen / $1,131 / €836) and 1 TB (189,000 yen / $1,916 / €1416).

As for performance, the Thunderbolt bandwidth of 10 Gbps and the RAID0 operation mode come together to enable transfer speeds of 763 MB/s.

Finally, since one of the main assets of Thunderbolt is the daisy-chaining support, the new SSD units do, of course, have what it takes for this. You can daisy-chain up to six devices actually, which is no small matter. It's all because there are two TB ports there, not that it's such a shock, seeing as how Thunderbolt gadgets usually make it a point to have two available just for that purpose.