LaCie is making good on it's promise to ship Thunderbolt hard drives. The Little Big Disk is out and it has two drives, uses Thunderbolt, is insanely fast, and is a little bit on the pricey side.
Intel's Thunderbolt technology promises screaming fast data speeds of up to 10 Gb per second over two channels. To put that speed in perspective it works out to transferring a Blu-ray disc in about 30 seconds. In a time where digital content is king, being able to move large data files quickly is not just desired it's practically necessary.
The thing is, without devices taking advantage of the port the speed is a moot point. LaCie has released the first external hard drive taking leveraging the technology. The drive comes in two sizes, a 1 TB drive running at 7200 rpm and a 2 TB drive with a speed of 5400 rpm. The units actually each contain two drives in a preconfigured RAID0 setup and they have two Thunderbolt ports allowing multiple drives to be daisy chained together.
The Thunderbolt drives will hit read speeds of up to 190MB/sec. LaCie is also developing a 240GB solid state drive which they claim will get read speeds of up to 480MB/sec. Either of these options would be phenomenal for someone like me who is currently digitizing their entire DVD collection, or folks who have a need to backup large hard drives frequently.
One of the other nice features of the Little Big Disk is the size. It actually lives up to the little part of it's name coming in under 1.4lbs. It has it's own cooling system built in and gets its power right from the Thunderbolt port so you could theoretically toss this thing in your laptop bag and be set.
So, how much is this little beauty going to cost you? Currently the Little Big Disk is being offered through the Apple Store. The 1TB model runs $399 and ships in 1-2 weeks and the 2TB model is $499 and also ships in 1-2 weeks. The solid state option isn't available yet and there isn't any pricing information available for that unit on the LaCie site.
Would you consider a Thunderbolt drive now or are you going to wait until the price comes down a bit? Let us know in the comments.
