Akitio’s SK-2520 U3.1 is a portable diskless enclosure that can be populated with two SATA SSDs. It results in a relatively quick RAID-enabled drive that can be powered directly via USB-C. Should Mac users give it a look? Watch our brief hands-on video walkthrough for more details.
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The National Association of Broadcaster’s trade show in Las Vegas is in full swing, and several prominent hardware makers have unveiled new Thunderbolt 3-equipped tools. Although there are no current products in Apple’s lineup that support Thunderbolt 3, it’s widely assumed that such hardware, made possible by Intel’s Skylake microarchitecture, is in the pipeline.
The folks over at Lacie, Promise, and CalDigit have all revealed new Thunderbolt 3 products at NAB 2016, bringing high bandwidth and high-capacity storage solutions to market.
Following its annual tradition, Seagate has announced a new collection of stylish, premium-priced drives in time for the 2016 CES, most now featuring USB-C and USB 3.1 connectors. Three of the drives carry Seagate’s LaCie branding; one is a handsome but Seagate-branded model.
The apparent flagship in the series is the LaCie Chromé ($1,100, shown above left), a 1TB SSD featuring a 10GB USB 3.1 interface with “up to 940MB/second speeds for intensive applications.” Described as “a trophy for tech connoisseurs,” Chromé is a Neil Poulton design that holds a boxy chrome SSD enclosure on an angle atop a circular pedestal. Additional models are discussed below…
No, Apple isn’t redesigning its charging & data cable again – but a proposed change to the USB standard will allow future USB cables to be plugged in either way up.
Existing USB cables have a top and a bottom at both the computer/power and device ends. The new USB 3.1 standard calls for the same plug – known as type-C – to be used at both ends of the cable, and for it to work either way up. iDevice cables will have the new type-C connector at the Mac/power end, and the existing Lightning plug at the other.
Computers – including Macs – will need to switch to the new type-C socket, but adapters will allow existing sockets to be used with existing computers.
Full usb.org press release below …
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Photo: notebookcheck.com
Our concern that widespread adoption of USB 3 might leave Thunderbolt out in the cold now looks even more likely as the USB 3.1 – aka Superspeed USB – specification has been announced. This allows USB transfers of up to 10Gbps, the same speed as the original Thunderbolt standard.
Thunderbolt is technically superior to USB 3 – combining PCIe, DisplayPort and power signals into a single cable – and the recently announced Thunderbolt 2 version (which will debut in the new Mac Pro) doubles throughput to a blistering 20Gbps. And Thunderbolt can deliver that bandwidth to more than one device at a time. But technical superiority alone is no guarantee of success, as the history of Betamax or Firewire demonstrates …
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