Seagate’s “mysterious” thunderbolt adapter makes an appearance at CES.
Well, not for all of the masses to see, but in a private area of the Seagate CES suite at the Vdara (NDA required). NDA or no NDA, I’m going to give it to you straight. Lord knows, I personally have been called to the carpet on previous posts as to the reality of the adapter, with deserved questions and concerns as to when it will be available to customers that have made the investment in Seagate GoFlex technology over the past year in hopes that a T-bolt adapter would be made available.
So let’s clear the air…the good, the bad, and the ugly.
What took so long?
Let’s face it, Thunderbolt is an entirely new interface technology that is much more complicated than the established USB or FireWire standards we are used to. For example, when Seagate embarks on adding a new interface to a hard drive, take SAS for instance, it takes years of development work with standards committees, within Seagate labs, application testing, you name it. Given Thunderbolt is a new interface standard established outside, or independent of Seagate, more complex, and thus more time consuming. It’s harder to do than you might think.
When will it really be available for purchase?
The Seagate press release says by the end of March for the portable adapter, and by the second half of the year for the desk variety, but they may be here sooner than we think. GoFlex portable adapter will be available in the next couple weeks, while the GoFlex Desk version will be here sometime in February.
What are the specs?
GoFlex portable adapter is single port, while the GoFlex Desk version is dual port.
What is the price?
GoFlex Portable $100.00, GoFlex Desk $190.00. A far cry from the target $19.99 price we see on the FireWire and USB 3.0 adapters…why? FireWire and USB controllers are established technology. Thunderbolt is still considered new technology, so the controllers demand a high price, and thus driving the price of the Seagate adapters upward. As the technology matures, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that the adapters will reach the pricing of a standard USB or FireWire adapter. Even at $100 and $190, Seagate’s solution, though it is single drive, is one of the more affordable Thunderbolt solutions available.
Does it include a Thunderbolt cable?
No. Apple is the only provider of Thunderbolt cables ($50.00). Seagate is working on their own cable solution, but at this point, Apple is the only name in town.
So, the good, the adapters will be available this month. The bad, the complexity of the interface caused delays in getting these things out to the market, and the adapters do not include a Thunderbolt cable. And, the ugly…it all depends on how you look at it. Compared to USB and Firewire, the price is high, but compared to other Thunderbolt solutions, it’s not that bad.
Not exactly everything you wanted to hear, but at least it’s real progress, and not just words on a screen.
As always, comments are always welcome…good, bad, and plain old ugly.
Thanks for the update and explanation, much appreciated!
Hands-on with Seagate GoFlex for Mac external drives with Thunderbolt:
http://youtu.be/ocWkzh4Uprk
Is it worth it to just buy two usb/firewire goflex 4tb external and then get the thunderbolt later? or better to wait for the drives that will have the thunderbolt adapter included?
I don’t believe that any GoFlex drives will come with the Thunderbolt adapters. I’ve read that the portable GoFlex Thunderbolt adapters will cost around $100, and the GoFlex Desk Thunderbolt adapters will cost around $190 sold separately. I doubt that Seagate and retailers want to sell a drive with a Thunderbolt adapter for a big price together.
The prices for Seagate’s GoFlex drives have increased significantly since the holidays, and even since June 2011, when I bought my Seagate GoFlex Desk Drive. If you have immediate need for drives, I guess that now is the time for buy. If there is no immediate need, I would wait for the next sale, and to keep checking the big name online retailers.
ouch, 150.00 to hook up my 50.00 drive. I will keep my firewire 800 till I sell a few more pints of blood!
If only Seagate could make eSATA adapter for goflexDesk.
Me & every other 17″ MBP owner would be happy with that…
@tmsim Thanks for the comment. Like any brand new technology, it will take some time for the prices to come down, and you know they will. Although, if you look at the entire market for thunderbolt products, the Seagate solution is one of the most affordable, if not the most right now. It all depends on how much you want / need that t-bolt performance bump. Thanks again – Woj.
Thanks for the update Mark! Seagate do have the least expensive option right now and seeing tht I alread have my 1.5 TB drives (3) i’m good to go. Now to hit Apple Store for the TB cables before they run out of stock…. got to run. (wink wink).
@Mark.
I’ve read that Seagate has said that Thunderbolt is offering speeds of two to three times the speed of FW800 (800Mbps). I’m using a Mid-2011 iMac with transfer speed of 6Gbps. My 1TB Seagate GoFlex Desk drive also offers transfer speeds of 6Gbps.
It seems to me that the Thunderbolt adapter should allow me to achieve transfer speeds of 6Gbps, which is 7.5x the speed of FW800′s 800Mbps.
Please let me know what should be expected, in specific terms, with regard to the transfer speeds, using the Thunderbolt adapter with the hardware that I have specified.
Thanks.
Well, I did some checking on things over the weekend. Apple issued a Firmware update for the 2011 iMacs in May, 2011, that updates the internal SATA port to SATA 3, at 6Gb/s. But, and this is a big but, the internal HD is a SATA 2 HD, which has a transfer speed of 3Gb/s.
I’m bothered that Apple had already been promoting Thunderbolt, but they have been limiting transfer speeds by putting the bottleneck at their internal hard drives.
I bought a Seagate GoFlex desk drive in June, 2011. I have been assuming that it has transfer speeds of 6Gb/s. But I haven’t found whether the GoFlex desk drives have SATA 2 or SATA 3 drives in them. And I’m reluctant to open mine to find out, since it’s got about another 1 1/2 years of warranty remaining. If anyone (Mark) knows for sure if the GoFlex desk drives have been using SATA 2 or SATA 3 drives, I would appreciate knowing the answer.
I will make an effort to stop by the Apple store near me in the near future to see if Apple has made the change to SATA 3 drives in iMacs.
using Thunderbolt or even SATA 3 with and old fashion hard drive seems pointless. The SSD seems like the right match
I’m talking about using Thunderbolt with an internal SATA 3 (6Gb/s) HD, and an external (Seagate GoFlex desk) SATA 3 (6Gb/s) HD. 10Gb/s Thunderbolt is the top end. 6Gb/s for less than $300 (for the Thunderbolt adapter and cable) total would be the best compromise for the money.
@DCJ001 Good question…all of Seagate’s desktop hard drives transitioned to SATA 3 (6Gb/s) in early 2011, so the GoFlex drive you have does have a SATA3 drive in it. Thanks again. – Mark
@DCJ001 Another great question. This is what I was told by the product team: In terms of interface speeds Thunderbolt is up to 12x faster (10Gb/s vs 800Mb/s), but when it comes to real throughput, Thunderbolt is 2-3x faster. At CES, we were demonstrating FW800 speeds of 65-85MB/s and 175-205MB/s with Thunderbolt, all on the same drive. I hope this helps. Thanks – Woj
Seagate Model # STAE121 is the GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter for portable drives:
http://media.seagate.com/files/2012/01/goflex_2.5_thunderbolt_adapter_datasheet_en_us.pdf
Well, the STAE121 Thunderbolt adapter for portable GoFlex drives is available at B&H Photo. But it’s $129.99. That’s a lot more than the !$89.00 that I have been hearing from Seagate.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/840972-REG/Seagate_STAE121_GoFlex_Thunderbolt_Adapter.html
Mark. Do you have any idea why the price is so high? B&H usually has the very best prices.
And what is a realistic expectation for the price of the Thunderbolt adapter for the desk drives?
Thanks.
Mark.
You can disregard my previous post. I understand that retailers may sell products for whatever prices they choose. I’m confident that prices will drop over time. The Thunderbolt adapter for the desk drives will be priced at whatever their prices will be. There’s no need to guess about it.
I also noticed that the Thunderbolt adapter for portable GoFlex drives is available directly from Seagate (several items from the bottom) at:
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/accessories
I haven’t seen it specifically stated anywhere as to wether or not the TB adapter is compatible with all GoFlex drives or only certain ones. I’m specifically interested in the Free Agent variety.
Thanks,
TB
Good to hear some news and that they’ll be here earlier rather than later.
I have a number of GoFlex portable drives, but I will need a Thunderbolt adapter with two ports as my display will have to be at the end of the daisy-chain as it has no Thunderbolt (I’m using a Thunderbolt to HDMI adpater).
Do you know if I can fit the GoFlex portable drives on the desktop Thunderbolt adapter? That way I can leave the desktop adapter in place and just carry the portable drives between home and work.
@Woj The 2-3x improvement at 175MB – 205MB/s sounds like the limit of a spinning hard drive. Were you using a spinning hard drive for that test?
Also this brings up the question of whether SSD will become available, if they’re not already, for the GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter.
I’m still keen to have my external (spinning) drives run as fast as my internal (spinning) one, so I’ll be interested in Thunderbolt for that purpose, even if it is a bit pricey.
Still, the promise of being able to add an SSD later to the external Thunderbolt adapter for further performance improvements, could be a sweetener, to take the bitterness out of the price of the adapter.
@Jason Hi Jason. Thanks for the comment. Yes – we were using a spinning drive for the test. Interesting idea to use some sort of flash memory as a cache on the Thunderbolt adapter to increase performance. We just might have to look into that. Thanks! Woj
@Jason Unfortunately, I don’t believe you cannot interchange Thunderbolt adapters for GoFlex Desk and GoFlex portable. Each drive form factor requires it’s own adapter. Good question. Thanks -Woj
Just an FYI that many of us trying to use a SSD drive in a goflex enclosure with the Seagate STAE 121 Thunderbolt Adapter have run into a problem where the Adapter and Drives disconnect constantly from the Mac under moderate load such as copying files. This seems to be prevalent with SSD drives rather than spinning drives, though spinning drives also have the same problem under heavier loads. SSD were tested with and without TRIM enabled. Different brands/sizes of SSD were tested and all have the same problems (Crucial M4, Samsung 830, OWC). Seagate apparently made aware of the issues with the adapter both by users and other manufacturers but no resolution yet. Hopefully the adapter is capable of having its firmware user upgradeable.
I’ve been using an OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD with the Seagate GoFlex adapter for the last few days as my boot drive with the 10.7.3 installed on it, and I have had great performance with no problems whatsoever.
I did read that some people are having problems with 240GB SSDs and larger.
You are correct, most reports on the net seem to be for SATA III SSD drives larger than 240 GB. SATA II SSD drives of large capacity (up to 600 GB Intel) dont seem to have any issues. That said there are also reports of occasional disconnects using Seagate Official 1TB GoFlex harddrives so it may end up being a SATA III issue combined with large size.
Heard back from Seagate support that this adapter is not supported with non-seagate drives, which is a shame as Seagate GoFlex is just a standard SATA connector system and any brand SATA hard drives work fine with Seagate’s line of GoFlex adapters except this one. They missed the boat on having the only Thunderbolt to SATA adapter with the STAE121 restricted to working only with Seagate drives. Too bad, they could have made a killing.
The STAE121 is not restricted to working with only Seagate drives. My OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SATA III drive is great with this adapter. And Seagate is doing pretty well without supporting other drives with their Thunderbolt adapters.
I guess the Seagate Support desk is not in the know that Seagate supports drives other than their own with their Thunderbolt adapter. Hope somebody at Seagate sees this thread and corrects their Support desk responses before more people return their adapters for a refund. Best case for a win-win for everyone is if Seagate investigates the problem and corrects the problem with these adapters so they can work reliably with SATA III large capacity drives whether with SSD or legacy drives.
Seagate, apparently, does not support or recommend the use of other drives. But other drives do work. I have been hearing about problems with other drives in the last few days. I have used the Seagate GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter with a 120GB OCZ Vertex 3 SATA III SSD for almost a week, and I have had no problems so far.