I've noticed a new Thunderbolt drive which supports daisy-chaining but not bus power [1], and a competitor's Thunderbolt drive which is bus powered but only has one Thunderbolt port [2].
I'd like to know if there's some technical barrier to implementing both bus power and daisy chaining on a Thunderbolt device.
My guess is that a drive manufacturer may not think that Thunderbolt's 10W is enough to power both the drive, and leave enough power to downstream devices.
But could a manufacturer build in the ability to use bus power or do daisy chaining, in the same device?
My use case:
- When I'm mobile (with access to AC power), I want to use my drive with bus power
- When I'm at home, I want to be able to use both my thunderbolt drive, and connect to an external monitor via Thunderbolt/DisplayPort (computer <-> drive <-> monitor).
Without this ability (in my case), when shopping for a Thunderbolt drive, I need to choose between mobility(bus power), or the ability to use an external monitor when at home (via daisy chaining).
I thought using a Thunderbolt hub would be a workaround, but the Thunderbolt hubs which are coming out all seem to contain just a single downstream Thunderbolt port, so they don't solve the problem of connecting to multiple Thunderbolt devices which don't support daisy chaining.
The only workarounds I can see are to either buy a Thunderbolt display (which does support daisy chaining), or to stick with non-Thunderbolt drives for now.
[1] http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10549
[2] http://www.elgato.com/elgato/int/mainmenu/products/ThunderboltSSD.html
