LaCie today announced the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2, one of the first external hard drives that will support Intel's new Thunderbolt 2 specification to deliver transfer speeds of up to 1375 MB/s, significantly faster than USB 3.0 drives.
Little Big Disk includes two 500 GB PCIe solid state drives from Samsung in a Raid–0 configuration and is able to support mobile streaming and editing of both 4K and 3D video. The drive features a fully aluminum enclosure with a Mac Pro-style black finish along with an optimized interior design that improves cooling efficiency.
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The drive includes a thermoregulated fan that turns on only when necessary, producing little to no noise, and it also ships with an included Thunderbolt cable and a three year warranty.
AnandTech has posted a mini review of the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2, and in testing, found 1400 MB/s in sequential read speed along with 1100 MB/s write speed. Engadget saw similar results at CES, observing write speeds of 1200 MB/s and read speeds of 1300Mb/s. A 300 GB file transferred in approximately four minutes.
Thankfully, the drives that were set up ahead of our arrival, and had been sorting files for some time, remained at nearly room temp. With two of the Thunderbolt 2 drives set up in RAID 0, we witnessed 2,000 MB/s write speeds and 2,600 MB/s read numbers.
The LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2 will be available during the first quarter of 2014 from LaCie.com. Pricing has yet to be announced.
Top Rated Comments
(View all)Let me guess, $999?
No... $999.99 duh.
This isnt for the average home consumer so even if it is $1k, so what?
Because businesses don't turn a profit by overpaying for everything they buy.
At last count I had about 70TB worth of external hard drives. Based on your logic, If each of those cost $1000 and were $300 overpriced, I'd have pissed away $21,000. I could hire a part time employee for that and it would be more productive than a Lacie external drive.
When you have a business and are buying these things all the time, it's even more important to get good value.
Don't tell people the truth. They want to live in their Apple fairy land.
and some people like to live in a world where they think they know more than everybody else and everyone shares their use cases and world views.
thankfully, we dont.
If you can get these for $700 (2x$350) retail, if you had a PC (or old Mac Pro) you would save $300 by installing internally. So this is a $300 tax for having the new small Mac Pro.
but then i couldnt grab it and bring it with me. grab-and-go is a feature, not a bug.additionally, TB2 will surely be in future versions of iMac and Macbooks, neither of which will readily allow for these to be installed internally. LaCie will want to sell them to any device owner, not just the nMP.
but dont worry, im sure you can find some other reasons to whine about apple products not being what you want them to be. but may i suggest -- instead of whining, why not start your own garage company and build the future you want? steve jobs did, and look how that worked out.