April 13, 2013, 9:30 AM — Intel's high speed Thunderbolt interconnect technology, found primarily on Apple's side of the computing fence, enjoyed a big week at the National Association of Broadcasters Show in Las Vegas. As the push for higher-resolution video continues to grow, so do the file sizes, making the need for faster sustainable throughput ever greater.
Which is why Intel chose NAB--the annual get-together for video pros with high-end equipment demands--to announce that the next generation of Thunderbolt is coming. It will double throughput from today's 10Gb per second to 20Gb per second.
A faster Thunderbolt is obviously big news for the peripheral-connection technology that made its debut two years ago. But it wasn't the only Thunderbolt-centric news to come out of NAB 2013. Here's a round-up of other product announcements coming out of Las Vegas--most of which centering around storage--that you may have missed.
Blackmagic Multidock
Blackmagic Design showed off its new MulitDock, a rackmounted drive enclosure with docking slots that allow for easy insertion and mounting of drives. The MultiDock connects to your Mac or PC via Thunderbolt and allows you to pop in up to four 2.5-inch hard drives or SSDs as if they were cartridges. Once inserted, you can create RAID arrays with the drives or simply use them individually.
Echo Express III-R
Sonnet Technology showed its latest Thunderbolt expansion products, the Echo Express III-D and III-R, which let you plug up to three full length, full height, PCIe expansion cards (like those that people used to plug into Mac Pros until Apple apparently forgot that it sold pro desktops). The D and R in the product names refer to the form factor: The D is a desktop enclosure and the R is a 2U rackmount enclosure. They'll cost $979 and $1179, respectively, when they ship this August.
T3 RAID
