I don’t often cover new product releases, but this year when I asked what you wanted me to cover at Macworld the resounding answers was “anything Thunderbolt”. Unfortunately there wasn’t much Thunderbolt on the floor at Macworld but a week earlier, at CES, Elgato had announced they were bring a Thunderbolt SSD (Solid State Drive) to market soon. If you listen to the Maccast you know I am a fan of Elgato’s video products, so it was awesome when I opened my email today and got the news their new SSD drives were now shipping. Technically, according to PR, they are shipping in Europe now and in the US in about a week (see the US doesn’t ALWAYS get stuff first), but who’s splitting hairs? This is “something” Thunderbolt! The new Elgato Thunderbolt™ SSD comes in two sizes. A 120GB version for $429.95 USD and a 240GB version for $699.95 USD. The enclosure is metal and pocketable and, since it’s SSD, there is no fan or moving parts so of course it’s completely silent. Likely though, the biggest deal about the drive is the speed. As you can imagine when you couple the performance of SSD with an advanced interface like Thunderbolt the results are amazing. According to El Ggato’s product page the Elgato Thunderbolt SSD is capable of transfer rates in the range of 270 MB/s¹, more than 3 times what you could get with a typical Firewire 800 drive. If you need a portable rugged drive with the fastest possible performance on your Thunderbolt Mac Elgato looks like they have you covered.

¹ Transfer rates on a 15″ Macbook Pro 2.2 GHz i7 using QuickBench 4 “Extended Test” (Read)