NEW YORK, NY — At last week’s PhotoPlus Expo, LaCie was demonstrating their Thunderbolt Series of drives, some of which are now shipping, and fulfill the promise of Thunderbolt with the fastest speeds we’ve seen in a single drive. Kristen Hunt, LaCie US PR Specialist, told us more about these drives.
The Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series currently comes in a 1 TB model with two 2.5” 7200 rpm rotational drives, and a 2 TB model with two 2.5” 5400 rpm rotational drives. A 240 GB SSD model with two 2.5” SSDs will be released in November. The 2big Thunderbolt Series, a larger unit which contains two 3.5” rotational drives and come in capacities up to 6TB, will also be released shortly. All drives come with two 10 Gb/s Thuderbolt ports, allowing one to daisy chain devices.
LaCie Thunderbolt Series Disks Can Daisy Chain to Other Devices
The test configuration in the booth demonstrated the daisy chaining ability, showing a MacBook Pro connected to a Little Big Disk, connected to another Little Big Disk, connected to a 2big, which was connected to a display. While Thunderbolt promises speeds up to 10 Gb/sec, current drive technology will limit this. Running a synthetic benchmark, the Thunderbolt Series showed a write speed of 290.0 MB/sec, and a read speed of 469.3 MB/sec. A Finder copy of a folder of 1 GB of photos from one drive to another took about 5 seconds.
Now shipping are the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series 1 TB drive for US$399, and Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series 2 TB drive for US$499.