14 DAY TRIAL // LaCie may have announced that it will, eventually, offer one or more products with support for the latest and fastest connectivity standard, but it looks like that promise will take quite a while to be fulfilled.
There is no question as to whether or not the Thunderbolt interface standard promoted by Intel and Apple is fast (10 Gbps), but it is suffering from a fairly acute lack of compatible peripherals.
Unlike the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 standard, which immediately got IT players scrambling to pump out compatible storage units and peripherals, Thunderbolt can't really brag about doing the same.
Granted, LaCie did say it would eventually deliver an external storage device, and it wasn't the only company to do so either.
Unfortunately, hopeful end-users that would have liked the so-called Little Big Disk, as it is called, to show up in the second quarter did not get their wish.
In fact, the third quarter is well underway and the only measure of progress in this area is the fact that there is, at last, a time frame for arrival, though still fairly vague and, unfortunately, not really encouraging either.
Basically, LaCie has updated its product page, mentioning that availability will ramp up during winter. In other words, either the Little Big Disk will show up in December or in the first quarter of 2012.
For those that want to get acquainted with the external storage unit, it can house either two SSDs (solid state drives) or two HDDs (hard disk drives), leading to up to 1 TB capacity.
Also, it measures 1.6 x 5.5 x 3.3 inches (40 x 140 x 85 mm), weighs 630 grams and has an aluminum heatsink that chills the units within without the need for fans.
Unfortunately, while a vague estimated time arrival now exists, the same cannot be said about how much money prospective buyers have to prepare.
UPDATE: LaCie has since contacted us with the assurance that the drive is not, in fact, set for winter but will be released, as was planned, before summer is out.