Thunderbolt External Harddrive Enclosure???

My Time Capsule has died so I removed the 3.5" 2TB hard drive which I intend to make into an external hard drive for my iMac. My ideal situation is to move my entire 500GB iTunes library off of my iMac and onto the external so it will continue to be backed up by my new Time Capsule.

I have been searching for the best external hard drive to go with hoping to find a Thunderbolt-capable hard drive enclosure. My iMac is mid-2011 model and only has USB 2.0 so actually making use of the Thunderbolt connection would be ideal. I've searched the internet for hours but can't seem to find any.

Anyone familiar with a 3.5" SATA hard drive enclosure which is capable of thunderbolt connection? Any suggestions would be appreciated....

Thanks

There may be some out there, but I've not seen a bring-your-own-drive TB enclosure.

For a Mac that has TB and USB 2, I'd suggest a FW 800 enclosure and Apple's TB to FW adapter.
Personally, I'd get one of these.
Since I still use Windows also, I'd pay the extra $10 for the eSATA capability.

north_guy said:

I have been searching for the best external hard drive to go with hoping to find a Thunderbolt-capable hard drive enclosure. My iMac is mid-2011 model and only has USB 2.0 so actually making use of the Thunderbolt connection would be ideal. I've searched the internet for hours but can't seem to find any.

Click to expand...

Ah.... according to EveryMac.com, you should also have a Firewire 800 port. That will be quite adequate for a single external drive, and finding a compatible enclosure will be a LOT easier. I do recommend finding one with a fan, rather than passive cooling. The ones with passive cooling just don't do a good job at keeping the temperature in reasonable limits if you use the drive intensively, especially for large backup runs.