14 DAY TRIAL // LaCie's Little Big Disk, one of the few Thunderbolt accessories that were announced together with the launch of this high-speed interconnect, has finally become available for purchase from the Apple Store, where it retails for prices starting at $399, roughly about 292 Euro.
The external drive was introduced at the start of February and can be configured with both solid state drives and HDDs to provide up to 1TB of storage space.
No matter which type of storage one chooses when ordering the Little Big Disk, the two drives found inside LaCie's creation can be configured to work in either RAID 0 or RAID 1 operation modes.
When setup to operate in the former mode, and paired together with two 160GB solid state drives, the LaCie external storage solution is capable of achieving read and write transfer speeds of 827.2MB/s and 352.5MB/s, respectively.
In order to maintain this performance, LaCie's external storage solution comes equipped with a high-speed Thunderbolt interface, which provides two bi-directional channels for data connectivity.
The Thunderbolt technology, previously known as Light Peak, was developed in order to provide a unified interface with enough bandwidth to replace all the current buses, such as SCSI, SATA, USB, FireWire or PCI Express.
Although this first iteration of Thunderbolt is still far away from reaching that goal, it still manages to join together the PCI Express and the DisplayPort interfaces and can provide, in theory, 20Gbps of upstream and 20Gbps of downstream bandwidth (via two 10Gbps bidirectional channels).
Thunderbolt can also daisy chain up to 7 devices and delivers a maximum of 10W of power without requiring any additional connectors.
The $399 price tag that we mentioned earlier is for the 1TB version of the Little Big Disk which uses mechanical HDDs. (via 9to5 Mac)