It's a movie thing rather than a purely photo thing, but this seemed like a good place to put it:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joedp/the-digital-bolex-the-1st-affordable-digital-cinem

I want one. And the hard drive array that'll need to go with it.

It looks very interesting. If you can “hand crank” the camera as well (for that slightly random frame rate look), I’d be very interested.

If you are looking for HD arrays, I was at the Broadcast Video Expo the other week. These were much in evidence, including a 1U MacMini server enclosure that looked pretty cool.

Was there much sign of Thunderbolt based storage coming down in price at all?

Most of the stands were not selling anything directly, concentration g showing off the wares. So if you wanted to play with a camera crane, you could. I did have a go with some of the more light weight Steadicam (and similar) hand held rigs, as well as tripods and camera mount monitors. A lot of these firms would send out technical staff to you to help set up the system, or recommended renting before purchasing.

There were some devices which connected to the camera’s HDMI out and gave you uncompressed recording as opposed to compressed footage on a card. No Thunderbolt on those devices (though you would expect in a year or so for them to support it). Most of the storage was USB 2 or 3, FireWire or over Ethernet. Those selling hardware (about one or two stands) did have Thunderbolt drives, but still quite pricey. USB3 was more in evidence there.

The place to have gone for proper sales would have been Focus at the NEC.