New SATA III Little Big Disk Can Hit 635 MB/second

LaCie bumped up the speed of its portable Thunderbolt-connected drives today with the announcement that the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series now contains a pair of SATA III SSDs that can reach 635 MB/second.

Thunderbolt has a theoretical speed limit of 10 Gb/sec, but in real-world applications that speed is limited by the capabilities of an individual storage device and its interface. Previously, LaCie had claimed a maximum data transfer speed of more than 480 MB/second for its SSD Little Big Disk.

LaCie says the new drives are fast enough to transfer a 50 GB project in less than two minutes or edit six uncompressed streams of 4:2:2 video simultaneously. Users can daisy-chain up to six other Thunderbolt devices, including displays.

The new model starts at $699 for 512 GB of capacity, or $999 for 1 TB. In a nod to the not-yet-ubiquitiousness of Thunderbolt tech, these drives are even packaged with a Thunderbolt cable. 

For more information: www.lacie.com