Product review: Elgato Thunderbolt SSD delivers speed shock

In terms of style, the Elgato Thunderbolt SSD has a modern, techy look. The dark-gray matte finish is good for resisting fingerprints and makes the drive easy to grip.

Performance tests

The hardware platform I used to test the drive was a new MacBook Pro with 8GB of memory and a 2.8GHz Intel Core i7 processor. The laptop was running version 10.7.2 of Mac OS X (Lion). (The SSD supports Mac OS X 10.6.8 or later.) The stock drive in the laptop was a 750GB 7200rpm SATA hard drive.

Since neither the MacBook Pro nor the MacBook Air support USB 3.0 or eSATA, comparisons involving Thunderbolt have to be made with USB 2.0, which has a maximum throughput of 60MB/sec. Thunderbolt offers a maximum throughput of 10Gbps.

My first performance test of the Elgato Thunderbolt SSD was a single file transfer.

QuickBench 4.0 test results

Using the MacBook's USB 2.0 port and a top-of-the-line thumb drive from Imation, I transferred a 1.19GB file with 327 JPG images. It took 1 minute, 4 seconds. I then transferred the same file from the Macbook Pro to the Thunderbolt SSD. The transfer time was cut in half to 33 seconds.

I then copied the same 1.19GB file from the Elgato SSD to the Macbook Pro. That took a very impressive 16 seconds.

Next, I performed a Time Machine backup to the Thunderbolt drive, which entailed copying 11.1GB of data and more than 300,000 files. That process took 15 minutes, 35 seconds.