Jun 24, 2011 11:37 GMT  ·  By

Even though it was announced all the way back in February, LaCie's Thunderbolt enabled Little Big Disk external storage device still isn't available in the retail channel, but early performance figures seem to promise this will become one of the fastest external drives available once it starts shipping.

To showcase the performance of its Thunderbolt solution, LaCie used two Little Big Disk units each packing a pair of 160GB SSDs set up in RAID 0 configuration.

The first one of these drives was connected to a 2011 MacBook Pro notebook, while the second Little Big Disk was daisy-chained off that, and the external drives were then set up in a second RAID 0 configuration.

In order to demo the performance of the drives, LaCie used two test scenarios, the first one setup to measure the pure transfer speeds of the Little Big Disk, while the latter was playing back three simultaneous Full HD video files stored on the drives.

As expected video performance was as smooth as possible, but the real surprise came when the transfer tests were run as the drives managed to achieve 352.5MB/s write and 827.2MB/s read speeds.

A single Little Big Disk weights in around 1.5 pounds and provides users with up to 500GB of storage space, courtesy of two 250GB Intel 510 Series solid state drives.

The maximum sequential performance of each of the two Intel SSDs mounted inside is estimated by the manufacturer at 470MB/s read and 315MB/s write, respectively.

LaCie has refrained from divulging any information regarding the release date or the price of the Little Big Disk, but an HDD version is also in the works.

Intel introduced the Thunderbolt technology in February together with Apple's 2011 MacBook and it includes two 10 Gbits/s bi-directional channels using a standard mini DisplayPort connector. (via Slashgear)