[David&karen]

Hi all. For those who have older macintosh computers with a thunderbolt port but no USB 3.0 or Esata ports, we have good news that we just got. We have a Mac Mini 2011 server that is very fast with a i7 Quad core processor at 2ghz. The internal 2x 500g drives are software raided to kick up their speed(only do this if you have full time backups going in case of a drive crash) but our backups/external storage was at the snail pace of firewire 800, even though we have gotten an external case that also supports Esata and another drive that has USB 3. The computers Apple made during that time frame(mid 2011-mid 2012) do usually have a thunderbolt port(single one on the mini, two on some other models) but peripherals that are native thunderbolt cost an arm and a leg. We found something from Kanex that plugs into the thunderbolt port and gives a full speed USB 3 port and a full speed Esata port. Our Esata with Raid 1(mirror) jumped 21/2 times in speed over the Firewire 800 - probably at the limit of the drives as they are sataII and that mirrors them to each other. Makes a perfect apple time machine backup for all our pics, the hard drive, etc. The USB port has a faster sataIII drive in it and is nearly 6 times faster than when it was on the USB 2 ports from the Mini. That drive is newer that the other one. It's fast enough now to use as a working storage for Aperture, iPhoto, and Lightroom. The adapter was only $79.95 including shipping, so it was cheap for the extra performance it gives. It does not have dual thunderbolt ports so if you are already using that port it will have to be at the end of the chain. I asked them about that and they said it was a lot cheaper to do it that way and I can't argue with that. To be honest it saved us having to buy a new computer to get really fast external storage. Anyway, hope this helps someone here!

Karen