10gbps

LaCie announces Thunderbolt external hard drive

Intel announced a completely new I/O peripheral protocol today called Thunderbolt, which had previously gone by the code name Light Peak. In a nutshell, Thunderbolt is a superfast peripheral standard with the speed of 10Gbps (1.25GBps) and almost no overhead. This means devices can be connected at a real-word throughput speed of around 1.25GBps. Thunderbolt is compatible with DisplayPort 1.1 and later.

Currently, the technology is available only in Apple's new MacBook Pro (which comes with one Thunderbolt port) and can be used only with DisplayPort devices, such as Apple's Cinema display. But that will change soon.

Today, LaCie announced an external hard drive, the LaCie Little Big Disk, that will be one of the first storage devices to support Thunderbolt technology. A prototype of the drive was used at the Intel demo today. The Little Big Disk has two solid-state drives inside.

The drive comes with two Thunderbolt ports and can be used to daisy-chain with other Thunderbolt-enabled devices, such as a display or additional storage device.… Read more