How fast is the new Intel Thunderbolt peripheral bus? Let's crunch the numbers.
Western Digital announced a new 6TB drive recently, which is roughly 1748 HOURS of high quality HD video from Netflix, Hulu, or one of the other streaming companies. To be clear, this is their highest quality offering currently, and you could record 73 DAYS of it.
So. How quick can we fill our disk under perfect conditions? What if I just wanted to fill every single nook and cranny of this behemoth? Below, I've listed some popular computer peripheral connections and how long it would take them. In short, Thunderbolt is the clear winner!
| Bus | Speed (MB/sec) | Time |
| USB 1.1 | 1.5 | 48d 13h 5m 4.00s |
| FireWire 400 | 49.152 | 1d 11h 33m 20.00s |
| USB 2 | 60 | 1d 5h 7m 37.60s |
| FireWire 800 | 98.304 | 0d 17h 46m 40.00s |
| SATA 1G | 150 | 0d 11h 39m 3.04s |
| SATA 3G | 300 | 0d 5h 49m 31.52s |
| SATA 6G | 600 | 0d 2h 54m 45.76s |
| USB 3 | 625 | 0d 2h 47m 46.33s |
| Thunderbolt | 1250 | 0d 1h 23m 53.16s |