Thunderbolt
Thunderbolt Video Interfaces
0Three major Thunderbolt video interfaces made some big impact at the show.
Mark of the Unicorn’s HDX-SDI will be out this summer and retail for around $1000. It’s rack mountable and features discrete audio interface for 8 channels.
Blackmagic also released a the Ultrastudio 3D for for around the same price in a much smaller package.
To me, AJA is the winner with their IO XT at just under $1500, theirs is basically a Kona card in a box that features meters on the front, 12v power supply so it can run off battery and most importantly (2) Thunderbolt plugs (the only one with this) to allow you to daisy chain storage and/or a monitor.
Thunderbolt Storage Makes Some Noise
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Last year’s NAB, Thunderbolt was just announced so there were hardly any real products. This year, every major disk manufacturer released Thunderbolt drives.
LaCie has several different disk offerings with Thunderbolt connectivity. The Little Big Disk comes in sizes from 240GB to 2TB and features dual Thunderbolt ports for easy connectivity. The 2Big model provides RAID flexibity with sizes from 4TB to 8TB and can hot swap drives. They also showed a eSATA hub to allow you to connect eSATA drives at full speed via the Thunderbolt interface.
Western Digital was showing their Thunderbolt Duo dual drive storage system. The system allows you to configure the the disk in RAID format to mirror the drives for data protection or use them as two individual drives for more storage. The case allows you to swap out and replace drives.
Hitachi (which is a Western Digital Company) was showing off their G-RAID G-Technology drives with Thunderbolt. These drives feature RAID 0 with up to 8TB of storage and a 3 year warranty.