LaCie Little Big Disk Uses Thunderbolt Tech

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By Kevin Parrish
published

This summer LaCie is shipping a version of its Big Little Disk external drive that uses Intel's new Thunderbolt technology.

Thursday LaCie revealed a new version of its Little Big Disk external storage solution that uses Intel's new lightning-fast Thunderbolt technology.

The news follows Intel's official launch of the new tech which was brought to the market in collaboration with Apple this week. Previously Intel dubbed the tech as Light Peak and was to rely on fiber optics, but Intel has instead renamed it to Thunderbolt and fallen back on a cheaper alternative for now: copper.

In a nutshell, the overall Little Big Disk package consists of two 250 GB Intel 510 Series SSDs (which have yet to be announced) in a RAID 0 configuration, two Thunderbolt connectors, and a sturdy aluminum chassis specially designed to provide enhanced heat dissipation.

As reported earlier, Thunderbolt features two bi-directional, multi-protocol channels (PCI-e, DisplayPort) with transfer speeds up to 10 Gbps each. The first jack can cover a multitude of devices like peripherals, displays, storage, docking stations, audio/video devices, and more given the right adapter. The second jack is for daisy-chaining other Thunderbolt devices, eliminating the need for USB hubs (think MIDI).

"Using copper cables, the Thunderbolt technology offers transfer rates superior to rack mount fiber channel storage," LaCie said. "These cables have a proven track record of extraordinary flexibility and durability no matter where they are used. Further, the cables easily fit into a Mini DisplayPort interface to assure backward compatibility with numerous displays."

Currently LaCie isn't revealing actual transfer numbers, but a previous storage prototype exceeded transfer rates of 700 MB/s while daisy-chained between a computer and monitor. Intel claims that Thunderbolt's blast of speed is enough to transfer a full-length HD movie in less than 30 seconds. The tech can also supposedly back up one year of continuous MP3 playback in just over 10 minutes.

“Intel believes Thunderbolt technology in combination with LaCie’s unique portfolio of storage products and displays will drive new levels of performance and simplicity for consumers,” said Jason Ziller, Director, Thunderbolt Planning and Marketing, Intel Corporation.

LaCie's Little Big Disk external SSD with Thunderbolt will be available this summer. Currently pricing is unknown.

Kevin Parrish
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9 Comments Comment from the forums
  • mikem_90
    Somewhere in the back of my mind, I keep hearing that LARPer going "Thunderbolt! Thunderbolt! Thunderbolt!"
    Reply
  • daniel123244
    Isnt this kind of useless? The drive wont actually back up a movie in 30 seconds unless its running at 10gb/s, which this is not.
    Reply
  • kinggraves
    Nothing but a marketing gimmick.

    The external connection would be TBolt, a connection that's currently a rarity. But what about the internal connection? Intel's 510 series use the SATA3 bus which means the TBolt connection will be bottled down to SATA3 speeds. You won't get any advantage from TBolt's extra bandwidth, and since TBolt is using an electrical connection currently, there are also no latency advantages from optical transmission.

    All it really is is Lacie wanting to say they have a TBolt enabled product. This is still not a useful mainstream tech
    Reply
  • papaswedine
    Actually SATA3 times 2... which equates to 12Gbps. Obviously they're not going to saturate that entire bandwidth, but the overall results are going to be better than anything else offered for external storage. The one thing that throws me off is why the he11 you would connect your monitor to your external HD..
    Reply
  • Wish I Was Wealthy
    Oh well at least there releasing more products,so we all can have a lot more to choose from...
    Reply
  • chaos133
    I'd rather not have RAID 0 for my backups, it seems a bit too risky for me.
    Reply
  • BartG
    uhm, unless you run SSD in the machine you connect this thing too its useless! The bottle next will be from the source or the destination unless both are equal with a fast enough connection...
    Reply
  • Be0wulf22
    BartGuhm, unless you run SSD in the machine you connect this thing too its useless! The bottle next will be from the source or the destination unless both are equal with a fast enough connection...
    What an odd statement. Useless unless both ends are equal? While I see what you are suggesting, this could be said for any hard drive technology of the past 30 years. "My PC hard drive is 7200rpm but my backup drive is 10,000 rpm...therefor my backup drive is useless."

    Reply
  • Be0wulf22
    Where did they say this was a backup drive anyway?
    Reply