Elgato, LaCie, and OCZ announce Thunderbolt storage options at CES 2012

Looking forward to some small portable Thunderbolt powered SSD's. I bought a new Air with Thunderbolt but don't have anything to use with the port. And since I only have 128GB I could really use some easy portable expansion. Another 128GB on a SSD with Thunderbolt and super speed would be perfect to store the big things I need on my computer but don't use all the time like my Parallels VM (Windows 7 with 14GB used) and Steam Library folder. (25GB at the moment. 36GB if I decide to install Portal 2.) Alternatively I can probably ask an Apple Store nicely to just replace the 128GB drive in my Air with a 256 for the $300 fee. But if a TB drive would be cheaper...

The esata adapter is what I'm looking forward to, but it's only 3Gb/s! Seriously, guys?? When SATA3 devices are becoming prevalent, especially SSDs that can easily saturate a SATA2 link, you come out with a device that's only capable of 3Gb/s? BOO!

Is no one going to ever offer an empty drive that I can just plug my own disc into. I would immediately buy two of these at a few hundred a piece and swap in the two drives I need at the time to do the high speed transfers. Ideally it would be nice if someone just makes a dual bay JBOD chassis that I could slide two drives into when I need high performance movement of data and then put them back into a regular USB 2 chassis when they are doing lightweight stuff. I have dozens of 1TB + drives, I don't need to put all of them onto Thunderbolt all the time, and if I buy a sealed box, that doesn't help me for moving the stuff around on the drives I already have.

I really think the Belkin folks are shooting up before they go to work each morning. I have an Air that I use for work. In the morning, when I get to work, I connect three cables. Magsafe, DisplayPort (Thunderbolt), and USB (a hub which has my ethernet and big hard drive). While I certainly would appreciate the ability to lose the USB connection and just run everything through Thunderbolt, how in the heck can I justify spending $300 for the convenience of plugging in one less cable when I get to work? Now, if it expanded on the computer's capabilities AT ALL, I might consider it, but this is just a glorified port replicator with a stupidly expensive cable to connect it.

At this point, the price doesn't make it worth it. When you can get a 1TB hard drive for less than $200, spending almost a thousand and only getting 240GB is ridiculous, no matter what the speed differential would be.

Why are tbolt devices so very expensive? Anyone done an analysis of that i've missed? That belkin adapter is just the sort of thing i'd want to get *in case* I'd need it, but at that price i'd have to know that i really do need it every day. Hoping the lacie 2big is a reasonable price. the existing promise arrays look very nice but are soooo expensive (even before the floods hit the drive fabs). Too bad they don't (AFAIK) sell them empty so you can populate with your own drives...