There will be many products released soon that feature Thunderbolt, but LaCie has got in there first. Take a look at the tiny “Little Big Disk” 500GB of SSD.
Don’t you love days where you are just amazed at all the new technology that gets announced? Hot on the heels of Apple’s announcement of Thunderbolt ports on the new line of MacBook Pros, Lacie has announced the Little Big Disk which houses two 250GB solid state drives.
Let’s just pause for a minute here. That is half a terabyte in a hand sized drive that weighs 1.5lbs, will run at 700MB/s and does not require a power supply? Am I dreaming?
No, so we will reproduce some of the LaCie info here, but make sure you checkout the details including some transfer stats on the website.
Thunderbolt technology supports daisy-chaining up to six computer peripherals. Devices such as the LaCie Little Big Disk will include two ports to join a daisy chain with compatible peripherals such as hard drives, monitors, cameras, etc.
A single cable attached to one of the ports provides two channels of up to 10Gb/s in both directions. This means that video and data can be pushed both ways without compromising the bandwidth. On a single line, an editor can digitize HD from a video source while playing high resolution images on a display.
Adding the Thunderbolt technology to a mobile drive brings the power and transfer rates previously reserved for fibre channel rackmount storage to the palm of your hand. The Little Big Disk featuring Thunderbolt technology weighs approximately 1.5 lbs. Further, the bus-powered interface gives users another layer of portability since they can travel without a power cable.
A journalist can easily carry the Little Big Disk with his camera and laptop when covering a remote story. Rather than waiting to cut a package at the station or in a mobile van, the journalist can quickly download his footage and edit in the field. Thanks to the Little Big Disk’s mobility and Thunderbolt technology performance, the time to get a package on air will be considerably reduced.
To complement the fast transfer rates offered by the Thunderbolt technology, the Little Big Disk features two 250GB Intel 510® Series Solid-State Drives (SSD). SSDs have no moving parts, making for reduced data access rates, higher levels of vibration resistance, and lower power consumption. Further, SSDs support multiple streams of uncompressed video and multichannel audio due to their superior performance and enhanced durability. The two solid-state drives are preconfigured as a Striped RAID Set for enhanced performance.
