LaCie finally delivered its long-promised first Thunderbolt device in the Little Big Disk. The drive is hand-portable but has enough headroom in the 10Gbps connection to supply a Mac with speed well beyond what FireWire can do. With a 240GB SSD RAID striped option, it can peak up to 634MB per second in read speeds and up to 870MB per second when two drives are daisy chained together.
The hybrid nature of Thunderbolt also lets as many as five other devices link to the drive, including a display at the end of the chain.
Along with the SSD version, which arrives in October for an unknown price, LaCie will also have conventional hard drive versions that put two 2.5-inch drives in a RAID stripe for either 1TB (at 7,200RPM) or 2TB (at 5,400RPM) of space. An individual 5,400RPM drive can get up to 190MB per second in reads, but four 7,200RPM drives can nearly match the SSD speeds at 782MB per second.
