News is good today with Lion, the new Air and the updated Mac Mini just being introduced this morning. I am waiting for a new NAS and was wondering how fast it would be to move the almost 4TB in media if the new Thunderbolt interface were to be used.

So let’s play with some Thunderbolt numbers:

10 Gbps = 10,000,000,000 bits / 8 bits per byte = 1,250,000,000 bytes

1,250,000,000 / 1024 bytes (1 KB) = 1,220,703.125 KB

1,220,703.125 / 1024 KB (1MB) = 1,192.092 MB / 1024 (1 GB) = 1.164 GB

So at full Thunderbolt speed 1.164GB per second Moving 4TB = 4096 GB it would take 3518.9 seconds which are 58.65 min.

Less than 1 hr to move 4TB.

1.164 GB per second means moving data at a speed close to 3 DVDs (single layer ones) per second!

And they say there are 2 channels each at 10Gbps, if both active that would cut the time in half. That is really really fast.