Apple’s Thunderbolt 3 I/O Technology
Whilst it hasn’t actually been announced (at the time of going to press), there are rumours that Apple will be upgrading
its already insanely fast Thunderbolt 2 I/O technology to a
new standard called Thunderbolt 3 in the near future.
Speculation exists that Thunderbolt 3 will double the bandwidth of the current Thunderbolt 2 from 20 to 40Gbps, whilst
supporting PCIe generation-3, charging up to 100 watts,
and having its power consumption reduced by 50 percent.
Thunderbolt 3 will also supposedly be backwards-compatible with Thunderbolt 2 and 1. Guess we’ll just have to wait
and see about this one, but it definitely sounds like it’d be
worth the wait.
WD Ae Cold Storage Hard Drives
SanDisk’s 512GB SD Card
Talking of hard drives, Western Digital has announced a
new line of hard drives, called ‘Ae’. These are designed
specifically for cold storage use, meaning that they’re
supposed to be a means to reliably store important, yet
infrequently accessed data for long periods of time.
Ok yes it’s expensive. Like $800 expensive. But really,
512GB?! That’s right, it’s now possible to buy an SD card
with more storage capacity than many PC hard drives,
thanks to SanDisk.
Although their 6TB capacity is nothing to be sneezed at,
they’re actually designed to kit out entire data centres, and
as a result will be sold in boxes of 20 with shipping
expected in late 2014.
Not only is the storage capacity massive, but it’s fast too.
The new SD card offers a 90 megabyte-per-second write
speed and up to 95MBps read speeds. With a U3 speed
rating, SanDisk says the new card will allow for “stutter-free”
4K video recording.
The drives are covered by a three year warranty, an interestingly short time period for something designed to be
utilised as long-term storage.
The new card is also resistant to extreme cold, water,
shock, and X-ray allowing photographers to use these cards
almost anywhere.
13 | www.firstdistribution.co.za