Shortly after Intel's Thunderbolt technology made its debut in the 2011 MacBook Pro, LaCie announced the Little Big Disk external storage solution which is one of the first drives, if not the first, to support this new high-speed interface used for connecting devices in a peripheral bus.

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

As we previously reported, Intel's SSDs have a maximum sequential read speed of 470MB/s while the drive's sequential write speed is rated at 315MB/s.

“Thunderbolt technology is a breakthrough in I/O technology and represents the future of mobile computing. Soon you will be able to carry workstation-class power and functionality in compact devices,” said Philippe Spruch, chairman and general manager, LaCie.

“LaCie is excited to be one of the first to deliver Thunderbolt technology with the LaCie Little Big Disk,” concluded the company's rep.

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.

Speaking of which, the interface shares connectors and cabling with mini-DisplayPort and Intel promises these will remain unchanged when the technology switches from electrical to optical cables (sometime later this year).

No details regarding the pricing of the Little Big Disk were made public, but the drive is expected to become available this summer.

If you want to know more about how Thunderbolt will affect USB 3.0, you can read our column “Intel Thunderbolt/LightPeak Might Spell Doom for USB 3.0” over here.