Soon after Intel's Thunderbolt technology made its debut in the 2011 MacBook Pro, Seagate and Western Digital, two of the most important storage solutions manufacturers on the market, have announced their support for the new technology as well as their plans to release Thunderbolt solutions in 2011.
Together, the two companies, supply more than 50% of the world's hard disk drives, so their support is crucial if Thunderbolt, previously known as Light Peak, wants to impose itself on the market.
"Seagate will support Thunderbolt with our external GoFlex drives with in calendar year 2011," said Nathan Papadopulos, senior manager of corporate communications at
Seagate.
Western Digital is also interested in Thunderbolt as Dale Pistilli, vice president of marketing, said to
Xbit Labs.
"
Western Digital believes Thunderbolt technology will bring both new performance levels and simpler connectivity for consumers to access and enjoy their digital media in new and innovative ways."
The Thunderbolt technology was developed in order to provide a unified interface with enough bandwidth to replace all the current connection buses, such as SCSI, SATA, USB, FireWire or PCI Express.
Although this first iteration of Thunderbolt is still far away from reaching that goal, it manages to join together the PCI Express and the DisplayPort interfaces and can provide, at least in theory, 20Gbps of upstream and 20Gbps of downstream bandwidth. This speed is achieved by using two 10Gbps bidirectional channels.
The high bandwidth available allows Thunderbolt to daisy chain up to 7 devices together.
The interface shares connectors and cabling with mini-DisplayPort and Intel promises these will remain unchanged when the technology switches from electrical to optical cables (sometime later this year).
LaCie and Promise already announced Thunderbolt solutions, which are set to arrive sometime later this year. Other manufacturers are expected to follow soon.
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