LaCie today announced the availability of the fastest consumer-grade portable, external drive -- the LaCie Little Big Disk, featuring Thunderbolt 2 and two PCIe Gen.2 solid state drives (SSDs).

With Thunderbolt's bidirectional 20Gbps maximum data transfer rate, and the two internal PCIe SSDs configured in a RAID 0, the Little Big Disk read speeds of up to 1,375 MB/s (or 1.37Gbps). The Little Big Disk drive is compatible with systems running Mac OS X 10.8.5 (Mountain Lion) and later.

The drive, which measures 1.6-in x 5.5-in x 3.3-in weighs 1.4 lbs., has a suggested retail price of $1,299. For that, a user gets two 500GB PCIe SSDs for a total of 1TB capacity.

The Thunderbolt 2 ports allow up to six Thunderbolt 2 and Thunderbolt technology-compatible devices to be daisy-chained together.

For example, the LaCie Little Big Disk comes with two Thunderbolt 2 ports, enabling up to five other Little Big Disks plus a 4K video display to all be connected to a single computer through one cable.

"With these advances, professionals finally have a truly portable solution for editing 4K video in the field," the company said in a statement.

LaCie's Little Big Disk

LaCie said that by connecting them in parallel to Apple's powerful new Mac Pro desktop computer, the Little Big Disk can deliver speeds up to 2,600 MB/s.

In addition to its post-production benefits, the LaCie Little Big Disk can transfer dailies ten times faster than any mobile USB 3.0 hard drive, LaCie said. For example, it's possible to transfer 300GB of 4K ultra-high definition video footage in less than three minutes.

The Little Big Disk's performance it added to by two PCIe SSDs configured in RAID 0

The silent SSDs are accompanied by an updated interior disk design to improve cooling efficiency, while simultaneously reducing noise, LaCie said. LaCie added two heat-dissipating aluminum plates in addition to a larger, thermoregulated fan.

"This means that the fan only turns on when necessary, and when it does, it produces nearly zero noise," the company stated.

With it's throughput speed, it's possible to transfer 300GB of 4K footage to the LaCie Little Big Disk in less than three minutes.

Lucas Mearian covers consumer data storage, consumerization of IT, mobile device management, renewable energy, telematics/car tech and entertainment tech for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

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