LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series Now Available

[btarunr]

LaCie announced the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series is now available for purchase. It is the first portable solution to feature the shocking 10Gb/s speeds of Thunderbolt technology. This next-generation Little Big Disk is the first product in LaCie's series of high-end Thunderbolt solutions.

Designed for the most demanding applications, the LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series will bring a new level of performance to creative workflows and professional storage users. It offers ultra-fast data transfers, complete system backup in minutes, and faster content editing than ever before.



"Performance can come in small packages," says Jason Ziller, Intel's director of Thunderbolt Marketing. "LaCie's Little Big Disk with Intel's Thunderbolt technology delivers blazingly fast transfer speeds in a truly portable form factor; we think media creators and entertainment enthusiasts alike are going to love it."

A FEATHERWEIGHT POWERHOUSE
The LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series sets the new standard for the storage industry. Featuring a pair of 2.5" drives in a Mac OS RAID configuration, the Little Big Disk delivers stunning read speeds more than 480MB/s in SSD and up to 190MB/s in HDD.

The more Little Big Disks you chain together, the more impressive the performance. Users can daisy chain several Little Big Disks to maximize the interface's capabilities and reach transfer rates around 800MB/s — truly rackmount storage speeds in a portable solution.

NEXT GENERATION STORAGE
A game changer for content creators and professional users, the Little Big Disk is the ultimate portable solution for fast access to data or on-set editing. It supports multiple RAID levels (0,1 and JBOD) and daisy chaining for storage expansion or connecting other peripherals. Additionally, it features a heat sink casing and quiet fan for dual cooling.

"The great thing about the LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series is its versatility," said Erwan Girard, Professional Business Unit Manager, LaCie. "No matter which Little Big Disk model you choose, it will serve your most demanding applications with ease and portability. It's the ultimate in storage technology."

For more than 20 years, LaCie has worked in the Apple™ marketplace, introducing innovative products and launching cutting-edge technologies. LaCie developed the first Apple branded storage solution and showcased the first implementations of FireWire technology. Since then, LaCie has collaborated with Intel™ and Apple to develop a range of professional storage solutions featuring Thunderbolt technology.

AVAILABILITY
The LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series HDD models are available through Apple retail stores worldwide and Apple.com. The SSD model will be shipping this October. All models will be available shortly through LaCie's reseller channel and LaCie.com. The Thunderbolt cable can be purchased separately on Apple.com. For full specifications and product information on the LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series visit this page.

PRICES:

• 1TB HDD 7200RPM $399.00
• 2TB HDD 5400RPM $499.00

[slyfox2151]

expensive but awesome!

[Completely Bonkers]

Yes, thunderbolt is pretty good. Funny how it is Apple ready to innovate (with Intel and Thunderbolt) and us PC'ers take a while to catch on. LOL

Picture is a little disingenuous. 5 wall warts needed and not shown! Once you start dealing with power and cabling, then rack storage systems become more attractive IMO. But nice concept art so communicate its capabilities.

[bear jesus]

The case does look pretty good, it's nice to see a finned aluminum case for external drives and this is a very nice little product but on the $400 for 1tb considering most other 1tb external drives are under $100, although i admit the aluminum case probably adds a reasonable amount to the production cost along with thunderbolt connection and the drives ability's demanding a price premium but still .

[xenocide]

Originally Posted by Completely Bonkers

Yes, thunderbolt is pretty good. Funny how it is Apple ready to innovate (with Intel and Thunderbolt) and us PC'ers take a while to catch on. LOL

Apple is all about proprietary connections, so something like Thunderbolt was right up their alley.

[Sasqui]

Why are they connecting a drive to a monitor?

[Jstn7477]

Oh, great idea daisy chaining your monitor to your 5 daisy chained drives. Some Mac jackass would probably buy 10 of these with 3 monitors, daisy chain them all together and wonder wtf is wrong with their Mac.

[Athlonite]

Originally Posted by Sasqui

Why are they connecting a drive to a monitor?

think display port + NAS ability

oh an the link to Lacies website states that you have to buy the cable separate

System Requirements : Computer with Thunderbolt port
Mac OS X 10.6 or greater
Thunderbolt cable (sold separately)

and to top it off they don't sell them but you can buy them from here for $49.00USD

[de.das.dude]

dont you get it? its all because apple wants to sue PC users when it comes to us.

[Sasqui]

Originally Posted by Athlonite

think display port + NAS ability

oh an the link to Lacies website states that you have to buy the cable separate

System Requirements : Computer with Thunderbolt port
Mac OS X 10.6 or greater
Thunderbolt cable (sold separately)

and to top it off they don't sell them but you can buy them from here for $49.00USD

Thunderbolt?

Display port with drive connectivity? Who'd of thunk?

[WarraWarra]

LMAO this photo with apple laptop thunderbolt and all that devices power from the laptop
ALL I know is that this pipe dream will never work maybe on a non Apple laptop sure or in 2015.
Everyone just upgraded to USB3.0 and not everyone was stupid enough to buy the only thunderbolt device Apple.
I can not see why I need to replace my USB3.0 devices with a more expensive weaker spec'd thunderbolt device just because Apple was too stupid to go with industry usb3.0 and thunderbolt in the mac book pro and 90% of my hardware is USB3.0 and not thunderbolt compatible.

Fact:
1. Apple Mac book Pro $2200 Aug 2011 can not even run for 1 hour on battery power with just osx active and nothing else in sleep mode. Call Apple genius they will tell you they know about it and it is normal.
2. Major heat issues on the power supply / brick just with the laptop connected to it nothing else / no USB.
3. The likely hood that Thunderbolt actually works in OSX 10.7 is less than zero but just guessing here based on 10.7 experience so far. OSX 107 is my favorite.

Lacie thanks for the product just not sure if or when I would be able to make use of it, maybe in 2015 when it is PC/Laptop ready / standard or OSX 10.7 + Mac Book Pro is fixed.

Not sure if Apple wants to fix OSX10.7 as they want to iCloud everything where you need to spend 5000+ days just to upload your files to their cloud that would have been hacked and compromised about 12k times during that upload. This is based on a normal USA internet connection that would if lucky get 35KB/s upload or max 512KB/s if on crystal meth.

Lacie-Solution / fix.
Great idea it just needs dual port ie: (thunderbolt and USB3.0) then drop the price to USB3.0 enclosure prices and you would have lots of sales. Make it transition friendly.
My WD 1TB USB3.0 device from 1st quarter 2011 for then $99.00 works perfect compete with this.

[Easy Rhino]

these devices run software raid. they are SLOW not fast.

[[H]@RD5TUFF]

Hmmm so thunderbolt is like firewire where devices are daisy chained, not sure how if I like that, nor do I like these over priced french junk.

[Easy Rhino]

lacie make pretty good products and their warranties are also pretty good in my experience with them. i would like to see some speed tests for data transfers. no way it gets more than 20 MB/s.

[[H]@RD5TUFF]

Originally Posted by Easy Rhino

lacie make pretty good products and their warranties are also pretty good in my experience with them. i would like to see some speed tests for data transfers. no way it gets more than 20 MB/s.

My friends Macbook air can pull about 70MB/s over thunderbolt, and I personally believe that is a driver issue with linux because the driver he has to use is alpha and open source.

[Easy Rhino]

that is interesting. i'll check out some more info.

[timta2]

It's PCI Express over a cable with the backing of Intel and Apple, two of the biggest names in tech. What's not to love about that?

Originally Posted by xenocide

Apple is all about proprietary connections, so something like Thunderbolt was right up their alley.

Yes, SCSI, USB, Firewire, ATA, SATA, PCI-X, PCI-E, Molex (and I could go on).

Hmmm so thunderbolt is like firewire where devices are daisy chained, not sure how if I like that, nor do I like these over priced french junk.

Yeah, that's a great reason to not "like that". LaCie was founded in Oregon in 1987. They are actually a very international company now. Some people are willing to pay a little extra for a well designed product.

[[H]@RD5TUFF]

Originally Posted by Easy Rhino

that is interesting. i'll check out some more info.

Yeah it's an impressive technology that is slated to change from copper to fiber some time in the couple of years.

Originally Posted by timta2

Yeah, that's a great reason to not "like that". LaCie was founded in Oregon in 1987. They are actually a very international company now. Some people are willing to pay a little extra for a well designed product.

I have owned one of their products there is nothing there to justify the price premium.