Cheap ThunderBolt Drive For Mac Backup?

It's been a long, slow road to the ultra-fast fast lane of ThunderBolt drives and accessories. More than a year after it's introduction, we're only starting to see a decent range of ThunderBolt external hard drives, adapters and peripherals. Up to this point, most haven't been very affordable or targeted Professional markets - and not the average Apple user.

Seagate recently changed that with it's highly versatile Go-Flex drive series which has been on the market for some time. With an interchangeable interface, you could choose and swap between various USB2, USB 3.0 SuperSpeed, FireWire or eSATA adapters to connect to it's GoFlex laptop or desktop drives.

Now with the introduction of the laptop and full-size desktop ThunderBolt drive adapters, Seagate offers the cheapest backup drive solution for ThunderBolt port Macs out there: either the Seagate GoFlex GoFlex Desk Drive with Thunderbolt Adapter or the portable Seagate GoFlex Laptop Drive with Thunderbolt Adapter. Both of these are a BUNDLE meaning it includes the drive, TBolt adapter dock AND a ThunderBolt cable for a complete solution. Up to this point, the majority of ThunderBolt storage solutions require you to purchase a $49 cable from Apple separately.

At around $270 for the 1TB laptop drive, or $370 for the 3TB desktop model - these bundles currently offer some of the lowest price ThunderBolt storage solutions available - though still twice as much as other interfaces. It's getting better. With time these ThunderBolt external drive solutions will come down further in price and make them more affordable to the average Mac user.

The only drawback? Because these are using mechanical, spinning-platter drive mechanisms, you're not going to get the FULL speed benefits that ThunderBolt ports can potentiallya deliver. For that you'd need a Solid-State SSD ThunderBolt drive solution which I'll discuss in another post.