I've never had good results from the third party solutions marketed by Apple for things like storage. Look at the review on their internal Mac Pro raid card.
I wouldn't look for ways to hook in PCI cards with third party solutions with the possible exceptions of things like Red Rocket cards and possibly if a mobile solution is required. It's obvious notebooks are the dominant OSX solution for Apple, so they are what drives the thunderbolt mantra. This is just leveraging that back, which is what I find moderately strange. Adoption hasn't been that great so far. Perhaps they're projecting improvements in that regard. Otherwise it makes less sense to shrink a case and place more things outside the box thus solving the problem you just created. In that regard they took the iPad design mantra and used it to redesign the mac pro
. It has less internal storage capacity than the imac at this point. I'm still curious what this is going to cost.
