As a video editor that deals with terabytes of footage, in practice thunderbolt is much faster than USB3. It's common that i have to copy 1-4 terrabytes onto several drives for editors, fx artists, archival, etc usually on deadline. I don't care that thunderbolt isn't as ubiquitous as usb, but like firewire before it, I'm glad it's there and common enough.
Except that many companies use large scale centralized network storage and are exporting the files over their network protocol of choice, and only need local storage for caching, temp, and swap.
That's nice in theory but every post house I've worked at still needs plenty of thunderbolt and usb drives. The footage isn't shot at the post house, it has to be transported and copied over to the SAN, and everything is on a tight deadline so it needs to be done yesterday. Or rather than using the in house colorist (or fx artist) the client decides to go with someone else, so that often means copying footage for that delivery. And the client wants two copies of it, one for archive and one because the creative director wants to dick around with it. Or the post house is over-booked and the only edit station is an imac not connected to the SAN, so copy it over to a drive so someone can start working. Plus with everything shot on digital it's not unheard of to get 20 or more hours of footage for a campaign. On a RED or ARRI, that takes up a lot of space.
Half my work now is out of my home now, I don't need a SAN, instead clients ship me a thunderbolt raid (typically a G-Raid) that I ship back once the project is finished. And I know more and more editors and motion graphic artists who are doing the same, less work in edit suites, more work at home. Fast, portable drives makes that possible (and efficient high quality codecs like ProRes and h264).
I've been doing this for 20 years, we'll still need fast, portable storage for many years to come and right now, for video editing, Thunderbolt is the best choice.
SATA tops out at 6Gb/s. One 7200 rpm spindle might not be able to saturate that, but a RAID array could, and any decent, single SSD would trivially saturate it.
So, for the kind of use case where you need to move lots of data, very quickly, eSATA may not be better :)
Well yeah, but a single ssd wouldn't hold lots of data, and for the use case described, I assume its a spinning rust drive. Also you wouldn't run a large raid array over a single sata bus, at the very least you'd use SAS and get multiple channels in one cable.
Edit: The g-raid mentioned looks like a 2x spinning array, so well within the limits of a single sata III bus.
esata is less ubiquitous than both USB and Thunderbolt (and firewire before it). External ports have never been standard on any macs and I don't ever remember them being standard on any of the HP machines we used (the majority of big budget editorial, i.e. feature films, tv, and commercials, are cut on macs, although fx leans heavily toward Windows and Linux). We use to install esata ports on some of our machine room systems, as the speed difference was definitely useful. I wish esata would have become more common but at the moment Thunderbolt makes it unnecessary (and USB3 seems to have stifled it's standard adoption across non-Apple systems).
Also, aside from the G-Raid, we also use 1 and 2tb SSD's (more for portability than the extra speed).
None of the Macs we use for editing have 10GbE or FiberChannel interfaces onboard, so you can use a Thubderbolt device to plug into high-speed network storage. ATTO Technology make some good ones.
