LaCie announces first Thunderbolt-packing external HDD

No sooner has Thunderbolt – previously known as Light Peak – hit the market in the form of Apple's new MacBook Pro lineup, than LaCie has unveiled the first of what will no doubt be a flood of new Thunderbolt-capable devices to be announced in the coming months. Thanks to the new I/O technology, which boasts data transfer speeds of 10Gbps, LaCie's Little Big Disk can perform full system backups in minutes and deliver multiple streams of HD video while offloading content without compromising performance.

Developed by Intel, Thunderbolt runs both PCI Express and DisplayPort protocols simultaneously over a single cable, allowing the connection of high-resolution displays and high performance peripherals. The technology was designed with mobile and media professionals in mind and it is such users looking to store, edit and quickly transfer large audio and video files that the Little Big Disk also targets.

To ensure the fastest throughputs, the drive features two 250GB Intel 510 series Solid State Drives (SSDs), which is sure to see the Little Big Disk priced at the more expensive end of the external hard drive spectrum when LaCie announces details ahead of the drive's release this northern summer.