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Thunderbolt dock
http://www.x404.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=15590		 Page 1 of 1
Author:  jonbwfc [ Thu Jan 12, 2012 9:30 am ]
Post subject:  Thunderbolt dock
For those with Macbooks this might be interesting. CES 2012 has started to see some Thunderbolt peripherals being debuted, and one of them is this Thunderbolt Docking station from Belkin.

Quote:
Includes three USB 2.0 ports, one Firewire 800 port, one HDMI port, one 3.5mm Audio port, one gigabit Ethernet port and two Thunderbolt ports (one upstream and one downstream) for daisy-chaining to another Thunderbolt compatible device.


Update - just noticed the "will be available in September 2012". Gah.
Author:  Amnesia10 [ Thu Nov 01, 2012 6:20 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Thunderbolt dock
Still not available. I was looking at the latest iMacs and they have done away with the FW800 connection so I will need to upgrade all my drives if I were to get the new iMacs.
Author:  jonbwfc [ Thu Nov 01, 2012 7:38 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Thunderbolt dock
Amnesia10 wrote:
Still not available. I was looking at the latest iMacs and they have done away with the FW800 connection so I will need to upgrade all my drives if I were to get the new iMacs.

Or buy a 25 quid adapter. Seems cheaper.
Author:  Amnesia10 [ Thu Nov 01, 2012 7:57 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Thunderbolt dock
jonbwfc wrote:
Amnesia10 wrote:
Still not available. I was looking at the latest iMacs and they have done away with the FW800 connection so I will need to upgrade all my drives if I were to get the new iMacs.

Or buy a 25 quid adapter. Seems cheaper.

I will have a look for one. At the moment I am not going to replace my iMacs, just yet. Though it will be an issue in future.
Author:  jonbwfc [ Thu Nov 01, 2012 10:09 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Thunderbolt dock
Amnesia10 wrote:
jonbwfc wrote:
Or buy a 25 quid adapter. Seems cheaper.

I will have a look for one. At the moment I am not going to replace my iMacs, just yet. Though it will be an issue in future.

The official one. From the reviews it works fine, but doesn't provide enough juice for bus-powered devices to work. I never had any bus powered firewire devices personally but YMMV.
Author:  Amnesia10 [ Thu Nov 01, 2012 10:21 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Thunderbolt dock
I do not run bus powered drives so that aspect would be irrelevant but if I replaced my MBP with a newer model I might need to rethink back up drive solutions, as I use the WD passport drive.
Author:  timark_uk [ Thu Nov 01, 2012 10:28 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Thunderbolt dock
jonbwfc wrote:
doesn't provide enough juice for bus-powered devices to work..
Well that's a bit crap.

Mark
Author:  jonbwfc [ Thu Nov 01, 2012 11:13 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Thunderbolt dock
timark_uk wrote:
jonbwfc wrote:
doesn't provide enough juice for bus-powered devices to work..
Well that's a bit crap.
Mark

I suspect that Tbolt doesn't provide exactly the same power feed as FW800, although both do provide significant bus power. Having to include a transformer in the dongle would make it quite a bit more bulky. Better to provide no power at all than the wrong power.

Update : wikipedia says FW is specced to provide 'up to 45 watts of power per port at up to 30 volts' whereas thunderbolt is only specced only provide 10V peak (note that providing any power at all isn't part of the original lightpeak spec, because that used optical data transfer). Looks like a tbolt port wouldn't be able to power a very hungry FW800 device.
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