Chris Davies at SlashGear:
The first demo was a raw speed test, reading and writing to the drives with 4GB files. As you can see in the video, the MBP was able to write at up to 352.5 MB/s, while read speeds reached 827.2 MB/s. The company told us that the same setup had hit 870 MB/s peaks in their own testing.
Reading from an external drive at 870 MB/s? That is fast. Faster than the popular OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD is even capable of.
When in comes to hardware stats like this I am still a dilettante, but if I’m understanding this right it means you wouldn’t even notice a speed difference if you had an external SSD hooked up via Thunderbolt. If you were simply buying an external to run backups to, there’d be little point to get an expensive setup like this. However, if you had one of the Thunderbolt-equipped iMacs with the non-user-replaceable HDDs in them and you wanted an SSD as your boot disk, it seems you could get one of these instead.