that IS interesting.... firewire and thunderbolt are supposed to be DMA (direct memory accesss) - basically the computer and the peripheral negotiate a memory region for a buffer, and the peripheral fills the buffer directly, and then the computer does whatever with it (write it out to another disk etc) This is a bit of a security headache, as a peripheral with unrestricted DMA can snoop or write anywhere in memory. (and i've had a firewire peripheral hard trash my internal hdd on one occasion)
Thunderbolt was explained to me as requiring a number of special io chips in each end of the cable (which was to explain the cost of the cable) and that was supposed to remove the workload from the computer, normally present with USB, which requires the CPU to read in data and fill the buffer manually.
Keep us informed, I'd like to know. I'll do a little testing here, I have a lacie that does TB and USB3, with an SSD internal, and will test it with copying to/from a new retina's SSD.
