We've been covering Thunderbolt storage ever since the first Promise Pegasus hit our labs last summer. Since then we've noticed a common theme: Thunderbolt storage is very expensive. Prices haven't come down much at all, although LaCie has helped fill in the gaps left by Promise's $1000 and up Pegasus line. I honestly wouldn't expect prices on Thunderbolt storage to drop until the second half of the year when cheaper Thunderbolt controllers (Cactus Ridge) are available. Ivy Bridge is supposed to bring Thunderbolt to PCs, which should obviously broaden the install base and hopefully push vendors to come out with more affordable solutions.

Thunderbolt is extremely important, particularly to the notebook-as-a-desktop usage model. Although SSDs have given notebook users desktop-like internal storage, external storage has often been painfully slow. The move to USB 3.0 helped address this, but thus far Apple hasn't adopted USB 3.0 in its machines. I suspect Apple will deliver USB 3.0 when it moves to Ivy Bridge in the coming months, but until then your options are limited if you've got a Mac. The fastest USB 2.0 devices are only good for around 40MB/s and FireWire 800 can deliver about twice that. If you need high speed external storage on a modern (2011+) Mac, your best option is Thunderbolt.

Thunderbolt's peak performance is very good. In our review of the Promise Pegasus R6 we measured 8Gbps of sustained data transfers from a four disk SSD array while driving a 27-inch panel, all over a single Thunderbolt cable. When it comes to storage, there's significant headroom in the interface. I don't believe Thunderbolt is quite fast enough to interface with a good high-end GPU, but it looks like we'll have to wait until at least 2014 to see that change.

LaCie's first foray into the Thunderbolt storage space came with the Little Big Disk. A hefty aluminum enclosure with two 2.5" hard drives (or SSDs) in a software RAID-0, the Little Big Disk hit price points as low as $399. If you need capacity however, you were left with Promise as your only option. Until now.

Read on for our review of LaCie's 2big Thunderbolt series drive.

Mountain Lion's first developer preview has been around for a couple of days now, and most of the banner features - largely composed of new imports from iOS - have been covered and discussed not just by us, but also by the majority of the tech press. While we wanted to provide you with some coverage of Mountain Lion, note that it comes with caveats - first, this is a look at the first developer preview of an operating system that isn't due out for at least six months, so everything you see here is very much subject to change. We've done our best (using both gut instincts and precedents set by previous OS X versions) to identify and discuss only features that we're pretty sure will make it into the shipping version of the OS, but nothing's final yet. Second, with just a few days of usage under our belts, this is by no means a comprehensive list of the changes so far, but rather an account of what we found most interesting as a current OS X user and administrator. With all of this in mind, let's get started!

The early 2011 MacBook Pro is honestly Apple's best effort to date. Only using quad-core CPUs on the 15 and 17-inch models, and offering an optional Thunderbolt Display that can act as a modern day dock makes this platform, particularly the 15-inch model, the perfect candidate for users who want the power and flexibility of a desktop with the portability of a notebook. Apple gets the mobile revolution in more ways than one, and its MacBook Pro/Thunderbolt Display combo is the perfect example of that.

It's this very combination that I've been using, partially since the introduction of the Sandy Bridge MacBook Pro earlier this year (the Thunderbolt Display didn't arrive until later). I've been quite happy with the setup. With the exception of lackluster Quick Sync adoption by Apple and obviously limited GPU options, I have very few major complaints.

Late last month, Apple updated its 2011 MacBook Pro lineup - likely the first and last update before Apple adopts Ivy Bridge in Q2 next year. We got our hands on the new base 15-inch MacBook Pro configuration, which received one of the more substantial upgrades over the previous model.

Read on for our review of the updated MacBook Pro!

I've written previously about the SSD lottery you play when you buy a new MacBook Air. As with many commodity components, Apple sources its SSDs from two sources. For now, that appears to be Toshiba and Samsung. Apple tends to pick suppliers that can deliver a reliable product in the quantities it's interested in. In the storage space at least, Apple doesn't seem to be overly concerned with performance but rather making sure the solution works.

A year ago, the Toshiba and Samsung controllers offered fairly similar performance. These days the same isn't true. While Samsung has updated its controllers, Toshiba's solution still offers the fairly abysmal random write performance it did a year ago. With the recent release of the Samsung SSD 830, I expect the trend of Samsung drives increasing in performance will continue next year as well.

Unlike the rest of Apple's notebook lineup however, it's not so easy to just swap in a higher performing (or larger capacity) SSD in your MacBook Air. The very first MBAs used a PATA LIF connector, a rarity on most drives. Apple eventually transitioned to a SATA LIF connector, and then with the release of the 2010 MacBook Air we encountered a new thin form factor SSD with a custom interface connector. In all of those cases, the market for third party MacBook Air SSDs popped up at some point post-launch. The 2010/2011 MacBook Air has been no different.

If you've followed the aftermarket Mac support business then OWC should be no stranger to you. If you haven't heard of OWC from their Mac efforts, there's always the fact that second to only OCZ, no one has been quicker at releasing SSDs based on brand new SandForce controllers.

OWC put out an aftermarket drive for owners of 2010 MacBook Airs based on the 3Gbps SF-1200 controller. For 2011 MBA owners there's a 6Gbps SF-2281 option: the OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G.

Read on for our review!

A week ago we published our review of the first sub-$1000 Thunderbolt drive enclosure: LaCie's Little Big Disk. Armed with a pair of 2.5" hard drives, the Little Big Disk ended up being the fastest, relatively affordable external storage available for Thunderbolt equipped Macs. For sequential transfers we were able to hit around 200MB/s, which is better than Mac owners can do over GigE, FireWire 800 or USB 2.0. Still, the Little Big Disk had one fundamental flaw: the use of mechanical storage.

I've been an ardent supporter of SSDs for a couple of years now. While I'm more lenient towards the use of mechanical storage for external arrays, anything above moving large media files around can definitely benefit from the use of SSDs. Neither Promise nor LaCie offered an SSD option with their initial Thunderbolt products. That changes today, err technically by the end of November.

The Little Big Disk family is growing to include a 240GB SSD version priced at $899. The drive will be available for purchase on Apple's website by the end of the month. LaCie sent us a 240GB drive to run through our tests, and that's exactly what we did.

Thunderbolt is the absolute fastest consumer interface available for users who want high-speed external storage. We proved this in our Pegasus R6 review where we sustained transfer rates of 1GB/s (8Gbps) from an array of five SF-2281 SSDs. There are just two problems with Thunderbolt today: 1) It's practically only available on Macs, and 2) the Promise Pegasus is extremely expensive.

In its cheapest configuration, the 4TB Pegasus R4 with four 1TB 3.5" HDDs will set you back a cool grand. Want the 6-bay version? That'll be $1500. And the top of the line 12TB model is priced at $2000. Less than $500 of that $2K bill is the retail cost of the hard drives, the rest is all chassis, controller hardware and of course manufacturer profit. As great as the Pegasus is for professionals who need the storage and performance, it's priced too high for most consumers who also want fast external storage.

LaCie hopes to offer an alternative for those who want more affordable Thunderbolt storage. Note that I said more affordable, and not just affordable.

Read on for our review of LaCie's Little Big Disk.

Ever since I moved to a notebook as my main work computer I've become increasingly annoyed with the process of actually moving my notebook-as-a-desktop around. At my desk I've got DisplayPort, Ethernet, two USB, FireWire 800, speakers and power all plugged into a 15-inch MacBook Pro. What makes it frustrating isn't the first-world-problem of having to unplug seven cables, rather that it doesn't need to be seven cables - Apple could make the whole thing happen with just two.

Every Mac released in 2011 has at least one Thunderbolt port (the iMac has two), and Thunderbolt can deliver exactly what I'm looking for. Thunderbolt can carry two things: PCI Express and DisplayPort, the former for data and the latter obviously for video. Why would you want to carry PCIe and DP over a single cable? To address problems like the one above.

Pretty much all device expansion on modern day PCs happens via PCI Express. Several years ago it was hard to find PCIe sound cards or Ethernet controllers, but these days vanilla PCI slots are nearing extinction and PCIe is the de facto standard. Ethernet, USB and FireWire controllers all exist as single-lane PCIe devices. Put a bunch of them at the other end of a Thunderbolt cable and you no longer need to plug in a bunch of individual cables into your notebook when at your desk. Send DisplayPort over the same cable and you can actually move all of those ports onto your monitor, thereby using a single cable to carry everything but power to your display. And this is exactly what Apple has done with its new Thunderbolt Display. By mating its 27-inch LED Cinema Display with a bunch of integrated IO controllers, Apple is hoping to deliver a display that's more of a mobile docking station than just a passive way to display video.

Read on for our full review of the Apple Thunderbolt Display.