My latest toy! I use Macbook Pro for all my computing need.. Apple introduced Thunderbolt Port with the capability of.. well.. lighting speed of data transfer. I always wanted to have a Thunderbolt external drive and now, I have one. LaCie d2 USB3 & Thunderbolt 3 TB Drive.

With the raw uncompressed AVI files i shoot for Sun, Moon and planets, my laptop's hard disk always complain of low storage. Though i have 750 GB HD, it still way too low to save those massive AVI files.

To give you an idea, today's 1 minute and 50 seconds AVI file had a size of 2 GB! Now this is for the Sun where i had to keep the acquisition time very small so the ever changing Sun's surface does not get blurred. But when i shoot the moon, i can go upto many many minutes of recording and the single file can be of 40-50 GB in size.. yes you read that right.. no type here.

Now imagine transferring all this data to the external drives.. i had to leave the computer on for over the night transfers.

Enter the world of Thunderbolt technology: My laptop has 12 GB RAM and the built-in hard disk has 5400 rpm. Following is the test result of the built in Macbook Pro (4 cores 2.4 Ghz i7 processor) hard disk.

Write and read speed is around 50 MB/s and 60 MB/s. Now see how thunderbolt external drive is doing in this test.

Look at those speeds.. a whopping 166.5 MB/s write and 169.7 MB/s read speed.. WOW!

This is great.. just great!!