More than a month after Apple’s unveiling of Thunderbolt, a growing number of peripheral manufacturers are joining the market to utilize the feature. Sonnet Technologies joined the effort on Monday at the NAB Show, announcing a new line of products that utilize the powerful new technology.
Leading Sonnet’s lineup is the Fusion series of storage systems. The Fusion F2TBR is a portable solid-state drive unit with two Thunderbolt ports that let a user connect up to six devices to a single port on the host MacBook Pro. The larger Fusion E400TBR5 and Fusion D800TBR5 are four- and eight-drive RAID 5 storage units, respectively, and both also feature two Thunderbolt ports—the bigger D800TBR5 is pitched to pro video editors and will come with a five-year storage warranty.
Sonnet has also announced the new Echo Express PCIe 2.0 Expansion Chassis. The device, which also features two Thunderbolt ports, lets users connect high-performance PCI Express 2.0 adapter cards—including professional video capture cards, 8GB Fibre Channel cards, 10GB Ethernet cards, and RAID controller cards—to their computer.
At the simplest end of the spectrum are two new adapters. The Allegro FW800 Thunderbolt Adapter lets users connect FireWire 800 devices to their MacBook, while the Presto Gigabit Ethernet Thunderbolt Adapter does exactly what it says on the tin—allowing users to hook their computer to a Gigabit Ethernet connection via the Thunderbolt port.
Thunderbolt (previously called Light Peak) is a new peripheral-connection technology, developed by Intel with collaboration from Apple, that combines data, video, audio, and power in a single connection. Sonnet said its new Thunderbolt-enabled devices will be on the market this summer; pricing information is not yet available.