At the IBC show G-Technology were showing a working technology demonstration of a blisteringly fast Thunderbolt 3 drive setup. Apple doesn’t yet offer Thunderbolt 3 on their MacPro and Macbook Pro ranges, but it is widely anticipated in the next release. In the meantime G-Technology are using Windows machines to show off what can be achieved.
In order to make use of the extra bandwidth provided by the connector the demonstration uses two EV series SSD drives, a 10 Gb network connection to an external G-Rack storage system and an integrated PCIe flash memory module. Across all the storage you get a whopping 2700 MB/s of data transfer using the box.
At the moment most regular users aren’t actually utilising the full performance of Thunderbolt 2, with the drive speeds and not the bandwidth being the limiting factor in most cases. That said, as we head into an era of increased resolution and larger video files, Thunderbolt 3 technology will certainly make life easier at the high end for DITs on set offloading giant RAW files, and editors wanting extremely fast scratch disks for RAW and multi-camera operation.
G-Technology’s future Thunderbolt 3 solutions will almost certainly have a high price premium when they launch, needing the absolute best drives to make use of them. But I look forward to the day when this kind of date rate is standard and more affordable.
