There are as I see it two potential issues.
The first one is that seemingly an issue exists that prompted to make the Thunderbolt device only detectable at boot time (i.e. no "hot-plug"):
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/thunderbolt-performance-z77a-gd80,3205.html
(it is very possible that in the time passed the BIOS/UEFI/whatever has been fixed)
See also this:
http://www.forensicfocus.com/Forums/viewtopic/t=7285/
The second is that for Windows 7 (I believe that only starting from Windows 7 Thunderbolt drivers are available) the target disk mode is most probably "simply" an external disk, so that there are possible unintentional writes issues.
The possible solution to the above would be a Thunderbolt write blocker, possibly the Logicube Falcon with a (planned) add-on PCIe card may do, but it seems to me like it is mostly a "theoretical" idea, where "Thunderbolt" was added to get more search engine hits:
http://www.logicube.com/shop/falcon/
On the other hand, one could use a WinFE:
http://winfe.wordpress.com/
instead of a "real" Windows 7/8/8.1 OS, but again the whole Thunderbolt business (and the installation in the PE environment of the suitable drivers) is so new/rare that I doubt that any experiment has been made on it.
All in all it would be really nice if you could convince your boss to spend if not the whole 2,000 bucks at least around 1,300 for an Asus, and see what happens, example:
http://www.amazon.com/ASUS-G750JW-DB71-17-3-Inch-Laptop-Black/dp/B00COQIKB4
jaclaz
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