Insiders believe Thunderbolt from Intel, Apple will 'greatly affect' USB 3.0

Insiders believe Thunderbolt from Intel, Apple will 'greatly affect' USB 3.0

Though Intel has said it plans to support USB 3.0 with its next-generation chipsets, some in the PC market believe Apple's adoption of Thunderbolt could have a major impact.

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USB 3.0 is a "transitional product" with legacy support for older USB devices. Thunderbolt, on the other hand, is viewed as the true next-generation successor.

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Ditto!

There's a host of articles out on this right now - and some from the other perspective worrying that Intel's support of USB 3.0 will slow/impact adoption of Thunderbolt. Intel has said that they view USB 3.0 as complementary to Thunderbolt - and I tend to agree - or at least that's how I hope it evolves. I like the idea of having a blazing bit pipe like Thunderbolt along with USB to address other devices that don't need a chipset capable of 20Gbps.

I would think TB is more of a threat to SATA not USB 3

Ramimac1 said:

I would think TB is more of a threat to SATA not USB 3

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On the contrary, USB3 is already a threat to SATA...TB is just in an area of it's own right now...at least for the vast consumer market. USB3 surpasses SATA2.0 in speed, and is about 1.1gb/s slower than SATA3.0...imo, that's not that big of a difference, especially since those speeds are all relative.

The way I truly see it, is that USB3 will turn into the "popular" thing to use for normal people, since it will use pretty much a *slightly* different cable when compared to USB2 cables. TB will be uses for high-end computers, and users who require major speeds, as well as the option to tether things together. I highly doubt TB will go mainstream in the way that USB has gone.

I would agree, I think USB would stay the standard since it is backwards compatible with older devices. It would be interesting to see if USB 3 would ever be thought of as an internal interface for Drives.

But TB could be seen as a (to your point) a high end interface or even a replacement for internal drives since it is so fast. not that rotational drives could ever use the speed advantage.

The one draw back I see to SATA is that is is not daisy chain compatible or even Hub compatible. That is where i think PATA had an advantage over SATA but it did alleviate setting jumpers on the drives(drive replacement for dummies you could say) .

So if you could have 1 or 2 TB connectors for internal you could then daisy chain several internal drives instead of multiple SATA connectors

I see TB as best of both worlds speed boost of USB3/SATA3 on steroids with the daisy chain ability of Firewire.