LaCie has officially invited their 2big line of RAIDS to join the Thunderbolt party, granting them transfer speeds up to three times faster than a tired old FireWire 800 connection. At 311MB/s, you better tell your data to buckle up.
The 2big Thunderbolt series will be available in capacities up to 8TB, depending of course on what level of drive redundancy you choose.
The solid aluminium case continues with LaCie’s tradition of making the most lovely external drives on the market while still being highly functional, with hot-swappable disks and the ability to daisy-chain a few of them together for increased performance. Somewhere video editors are smiling at the prospect of cutting multiple HD streams with nary a hiccup or dropped frames.
And if you’ve still got a couple of eSATA external drives sitting on your desk, they’re invited to the party too because LaCie’s new eSATA Thunderbolt Hub’s got their name on the list.
Not surprisingly it connects to your Mac via its Thunderbolt port, expanding it to two eSATA connections plus an additional Thunderbolt port for peripherals like a display. Up to 12 eSATA drives can be connected to your Mac through the hub at one time, at their full 3Gb/s (remember that’s bits, not bytes) speeds. Both will be available sometime in the first quarter of 2012, with pricing info coming closer to their release. [LaCie]