 Welcome to my unboxing of a new external drive solution from Seagate. This is the GoFlex desk for Mac and while I normally don't really focus on Mac products too much on this channel, don't hit the dislike button yet guys because this product is not only for Mac. The thing that makes it for Mac is the fact that it is Thunderbolt ready, but Thunderbolt has arrived on the PC. Here's a high-end Asus motherboard, BAM! Thunderbolt. So, we are actually going to be trying this out on a PC, so we'll find out just how Mac optimized it happens to be, but in the meantime, yes, okay. Mostly Thunderbolt has been deployed on the Mac. Up to 20 times faster than USB 2, up to 2 times faster than USB 3. It is compatible with Apple Time Machine, good for it. It can also carry, oh, check this out, it includes a Thunderbolt cable. This is no small matter because Thunderbolt cables are not cheap. They are not the same as DisplayPort cables, even though the pinout and the physical connector looks the same on first glance. They are different because a Thunderbolt cable actually has active processing, actual chips in either end of the cable. It is an active cable that makes it able to carry such an immense amount of data over that kind of a distance in an external connector. Okay, durable soft touch finish, high performance desktop hard drive compatible with Thunderbolt displays and other devices. Okay, 10 gigabit per second interface, up 12 times faster than Firewire 800, dual ports allowing daisy chaining up to six devices, minimizing clutter on your desktop, and inside the box you got a bunch of stuff, which we are obviously going to find because we are going to open the box. Let's look at the accessories first. In here we find a power connector. We also find a, aha, this is my trivial no laughing matter included Thunderbolt cable. So one of the easiest ways to tell the difference between a Thunderbolt cable and a DisplayPort cable is the Thunderbolt logo on it. Okay, so yes, DisplayPort cables will have a DP logo, Thunderbolt ready cables will have a Thunderbolt logo. Also, for the time being, most Thunderbolt cables have a much longer connector than most DisplayPort cables. Let me actually go find one. All right, so these are some of the different ways the cables can be recognized. So the two on the outside are Thunderbolt, the one with the DP on it, this one right here is DisplayPort, and the one with no label but the shorter connector is also DisplayPort. So Thunderbolt cables can carry DisplayPort signals, but DisplayPort cables cannot carry Thunderbolt signals because they don't have the active processing chips inside the cables. Okay, so here's our Thunderbolt cable. Ta-da! Okay, moving on. Next we have the GoFlex Desk Thunderbolt adapter. This is a quick start guide, so let's have a look and see how you quick start. Okay, you get all the stuff and then you plug the thing into the thing, into the other thing, so the wall into the thing, into the other thing, okay? You use only with the Seagate provided limited power supply. Okay, got it. Done. Number two, you plug the Thunderbolt thing into the other Thunderbolt thing with the Thunderbolt cable. Bam! That's how quick it is. Holy smokes. Okay, let's open up the actual drive itself. Ooh, this actually feels very nice. Yeah, they do. They have that soft touch finish on it. Seems pretty durable at first glance. That's kind of nice. They've got ventilation in the back, so you can see right there. Oh, yeah, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. This looks solid from here and then this is open, so it's like business in the front, party in the back. Yeah, I went there. Okay, so here, I want to clarify something a little bit. Here's we've got a Seagate three and a half inch external drive. This GoFlex Desk for Mac is actually a combination of two products, sort of. The three and a half inch drive is from their, okay, so this is their backup plus drive. So you can buy another backup plus drive and then you can actually mount it. See, it's just a SATA connection down there. So you just mount it to the Thunderbolt docking station right here. So you've got a couple little foam bits here so you don't scratch up your drive when you're putting it in and out. You've also got, this is going to get really shiny if I take that off, so Slick will thank me for leaving it on. But you've got like a plastic cover for protecting this surface as well. Okay, you've got three posts here as well as the SATA connectors. You've got what looks like ventilation holes in the bottom, four rubber pieces here to keep it from slipping around. And power and two Thunderbolt connections, as well as a Seagate logo. So you can actually use this as a quick and convenient way to, instead of just using like external drives, like you know, just lying around, you just buy these with their modular and sort of GoFlex, I don't know if they call, yeah, they still call it GoFlex. Okay, so the GoFlex interface, I don't know if you guys know this, but we use GoFlex drives for our test bench because that allows us to quickly switch between USB 3, eSATA, or whatever is the most convenient interface with just with their GoFlex cable connectors. So this uses like a GoFlex-y type interface to clip into the Thunderbolt base. Or there are ones that, as you can see here, don't come with a Thunderbolt base, they come with a different base. And then you just leave the base plugged in, you get a bunch of these, and you can just kind of go, okay, you put it on, hopefully I can get it to come off. There we go. Wow, that clips on there pretty good. Okay, so you just, you know, you put like a label on it, like blah, blah, blah, video archive, June, whatever, to May, or May goes before June. So June 2012 to May 2013. You put that away, you keep it on a shelf, you get another one, you throw it onto your Thunderbolt docking port here, your, whatever they want to call it, GoFlex desk Thunderbolt dock guy, and then you go ahead and start filling up a new one. So the advantage of Thunderbolt is that compared to interfaces like USB, which aren't really designed for intensive I.O., they're fast, but they're mostly fast with pure sequential reads and writes. If you want to actually use it as a scratch disk or use it to run applications off of, say for example if you have a notebook that doesn't have a ton of internal storage because it uses an SSD, and you want to be able to plug into your desk and have mass storage that is going to be truly fast, even when you're accessing small files, and even when you're running programs directly off of it, something like this is going to be the way to go, even compared to solutions like USB 3. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Seagate GoFlex desk for Mac and PC, because PCs have Thunderbolt now. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.