Thunderbolt might be a hell lot faster in upcoming years. According to Gizmodo, Intel claims to work on new Thunderbolt version which will use fiber optic cable to push data. With this new way of pushing data, the data speed can be in the range of 700 MB/sec.
Imagine by today standard, a dual layer disk of Blu-ray can hold up to 50 GB of data. If my math isn’t wrong, then it takes only 71.43 seconds for one to completely transfer the maximum data capacity of a a dual layer disk Blu-ray over this newest Thunderbolt version that Intel is working on. It’s just plain awesome to see the transferring of data this large this fast!
A commenter on Gizmodo raises an issue where this newest Thunderbolt version yet might be useless, because there isn’t any storage technology that has yet to show it will also be able to read and write data at such speed. But to point this out, the commenter is wrong about this if Wikipedia is on the money! According to Wikipedia’s article “Solid-state drive,” and I quote verbatim:
At Cebit 2009, OCZ demonstrated a 1 terabyte (TB) flash SSD using a PCI Express ×8 interface. It achieves a maximum write speed of 654 megabytes per second (MB/s) and maximum read speed of 712 MB/s.[21] In December 2009, Micron Technology announced the world’s first SSD using a 6 gigabits per second (Gbit/s) or 600 (MB/s) SATA interface.
As you can see, I don’t think the future has to worry about achieving the 700 MB/sec write and read speed of a storage technology since OCZ had demonstrated that it could already done something similar in 2009. If OCZ can, I think others will be able to do so too. So, it’s naturally to assume, I should say safely assume, that a compatible storage technology with the newest Thunderbolt version yet might be readily available in the upcoming years.
Sources: http://gizmodo.com/5844210/thunderbolt-will-become-even-faster++just-with-new-cables, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive
Vinh Nguyen
