I've been looking for a way to expand my iMac a little - especially given it doesn't have USB 3. Previously, Belkin and Matrox did them but they're both in the 250 quid range. Now CalDigit have done one that looks pretty much as good, but is only 150 quid, which is more in the price range I was thinking of. Goes on sale tomorrow and they have a UK online shop..

Caldigt Thunderstation

If you are trying to expand storage can you not use FW?

Firewire is too slow. It was the connection 5 or 6 years ago, but USB 2 caught up and eSATA stormed past it; I have used eSATA on all machines other than my iMac for the last 4 years, because it was simply the fastest method. USB suffered from being artificially throttled on the Mac platform for a while, so that it didn't show Firewire in a bad light - something which always annoyed me, my 2004 AMD desktop could transfer at 54MBps over USB, whilst Apple throttled the USB on my 2007 iMac to 12MBPS.

eSATA ran rings around firewire when in came out 5 or 6 years ago and was the preferable way of attaching external storage, even small raids, on consumer PCs (pro machines used SAS) and now Thunderbolt is taking over.

Jon, the port looks very good. It would make a nice dock for a MacBook if you don't want to fork out for a Thunderbolt display. A 27" display plus the dock will leave you about 400 Euros in your pocked, compared to the Apple Thunderbolt display.

Be careful what you attach, if you are on Macericks:

http://www.zdnet.com/mavericks-issues-r ... 000022732/

Looks like Mavericks is causing problems with eSATA cards in MacBook Pros (17" 2010 seems to be affected at the moment) and Thunderbolt storage (Western Digital and Promise).

A friend's been looking at these - http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echo15thunderboltdock.html - which has much more going on, but presumably a price tag to match.
Edit: £330 apparently.

I've got two thunderbolt drives plugged into my iMac, both Seagate, which seem to be working fine under 10.9.

Tempting fate of course but there you go...

Am, the thing I'm really after is USB 3. You can get an awful lot io USB 3 flash drives etc but I've never seen anything for thunderbolt or fw800 that isn't quite expensive.