LaCie Brings (more) Affordable Thunderbolt Storage to Macs with Little Big Disk, Available in Retail
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 20, 2011 1:40 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- Mac
- Apple
- LaCie
- Thunderbolt
- Little Big Disk
At IDF I met with LaCie and got a quick demo of its Little Big Disk Thunderbolt storage solution. The heavy metal chassis is home to two 2.5" drive bays, which come populated with either two HDDs or two SSDs. The HDD version is available in 1TB (2 x 500GB) and 2TB (2 x 1TB) capacities, priced at $399 and $499 respectively. The SSD options are TBD. LaCie will not be offering a BYOD version unfortunately.
The drives ship in RAID-0 however the Little Big Disk doesn't have any internal RAID controllers (just SATA), the array is enabled through OS X's Disk Utility in software (RAID-0/1 and JBOD are supported). LaCie promises sequential read performance of up to 480MB/s with SSDs and 190MB/s with HDDs.
The Little Big Disk requires an external power supply and it can daisy chain up to 6 more Thunderbolt devices for a total of 8 (Mac + LBD + up to 6 more TB devices).
The big news here is that LaCie will be offering the Little Big Disk in retail and etail through Apple. So far you could only purchase Promise's Pegasus through Apple's online store (although I hear that's going to change soon).
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MGSsancho - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - link
Would be great as scratch, cache, swap, what-ever-you-want-to-call-it for any mac product.estrello - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - link
$400 for 1TB and $500 for 2TB is called affordable? who wrote this, LaCie PR?quiksilvr - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - link
Seriously! How about just a Thunderbolt case for $50 and let us stick our own drives in them?KPOM - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - link
It is ideal for videographers and anyone else needing maximum throughput. You can actually daisy chain them together for even faster speeds.http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10549
That said, there won't be many consumer takers at $400. If slightly slower setups become available at the $200 range, though, they would make for good backup drives.
inighthawki - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - link
A 1TB drive goes as low as $55-$60 on newegg for an average drive, and you can usually get pretty decent deals on externals. That means they are charging $340 for the thunderbolt casing. I laugh if you honestly think that there's any justification for a $340 casing just because it supports thunderbolt.Wizzdo - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - link
129.95 at B&H Photo & 109.99 at NewEgg for a single 2.5" 1 TB drive.Not sure where you got your prices from.
zorxd - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 - link
What's the advantage of an external 2.5" hard drive when you need an external power supply? They should have gone with 3.5" drives. Much cheaper and faster. It's not as if you are going to put this in your pocket anyway.kacharpatti - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - link
Yes. It is affordable because they don't charge $1000 for the casing. Thank you very much LaCie for being so generous. :)enderwiggin21 - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - link
How hard is it to pop a LaCie case open and drop in our own drives?Since the raid has to be configured through Disk Utility anyway........