10 Gigabit Networking Between Macs via Thunderbolt Bridge (Built-in!)

OWC offers high quality Thunderbolt cables in red/green/blue/black colors from 0.5 to 3.0 meters, as well as Thunderbolt optical cables from 10.0 to 30.0 meters in length.

Update 02 Feb 2016: further testing shows that Thunderbolt networking is not ready for prime time; performance drops well below gigabit ethernet speeds after only 10GB or so of transfers. See updated performance results (sustained heavy load).

MPG hadn’t actually ever set up Thunderbolt Bridge networking. But having the near daily photographic task of dealing with multi-gigabyte files, using a 2nd machine for script-driven operations meant that fast networking would be a big plus (Photoshop cannot be used for anything else while a script is running).

Multi-gigabyte Photoshop PSB files open about as fast as on a fast local SSD volume.

This might be the perfect use for one more more 8TB OWC Viper SSDs, e.g., sharing files among multiple Macs on a hyper fast and huge SSD attached to one Mac in a workgroup.

OMG.

Thunderbolt 10 Gigabit Networking: Setting Up Between Macs

Thunderbolt 10 Gigabit Networking: Real World Performance

10 Gigabit Thunderbolt Bridge networking vs Gigabit Ethernet