Feb 25

Lacie’s Little Big Drive Shows Thunderbolt Is Great for Storage

Posted in: storage, thunderbolt, Today's Chili

Lacie’s Thunderbolt-equipped Little Big Drive will be available this summer

Boom! As quick as a flash, Lacie has announced what is probably the first Thunderbolt-compatible hard drive to market. And when I say “to market”, I mean “to have a press release.” The drive is a version of Lacie’s Little Big Disk, the compact 7200rpm USB/FireWire/eSATA drive that is already pretty well-specced as it is.

Thunderbolt is the new super-fast connection interface from Intel and Apple, and was announced yesterday as part of the new MacBook Pro lineup. The connector is particularly suitable for portable hard drives: It provides 10 watts of power, so even a big, fast hard drive will be well served, and the multi-protocol nature of Thunderbolt does away with all the ports in the back. A pair of Thunderbolt ports will connect to anything with the right adapter: eSATA, USB and FireWire are all covered. And that second port is for daisy-chaining other Thunderbolt peripherals, meaning you’ll never have to carry a USB hub ever again.

Lacie’s take on this goes a little further. The new Little Big Disk will come packed with a pair of 250GB Intel 510 Series SSDs. Those should make sure that the read/write speeds can keep up with what is being squirted down the cable. Price is yet to be announced, but an HDD version shouldn’t be far off the price of the $300 1TB drive you can buy today.

I’m pretty excited about Thunderbolt. As a Mac user, I have gotten sick with the ever-changing ports in recent years. FireWire is dropped, and then returns; display ports seem to change almost monthly; and USB is just too slow. Now, with one port to rule them all, I can forget about one more tech annoyance.

Little Big Disk featuring Thunderbolt technology [Lacie. Thanks, Audra!]

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