Ultra-fast, Apple-only Thunderbolt technology is about to get a little less exclusive. According to CNET, LaCie plans to unveil PC compatibility for the 10Gb/s Thunderbolt during the upcoming NAB 2012 trade show.
The Little Big Disk is simply the fastest way to back up your data, but it’s also, finally, a delivery on Apple’s promise that Thunderbolt would do crazy things to our tech lives. That promise came true.
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.
A weird quirk of LaCie drives: The desktop models feel like cheap crap, from the materials to the electronics (I’m particularly thinking of Neil Poulton’s drive), but their portable drives are solid. This Porsche-designed drive feels like it just might stop bullets.
The cloud is good, yes! But it’s easy to understand how it could make security-minded folks a bit woozy, what with all those personal files just sitting there waiting to be compromised. If that thought makes you feel woozy, perhaps you should look into LaCie’s Wuala service, a secure online storage locker built on technology developed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. It now has an iOS app.
At first glance you wonder if this USB key needs to go on a diet. Like something from ten years ago, it seems much bigger than it needs to be. Oh, but then you find it’s packing 120GB in there, and will dump it all at a rate of 260MB/s. Suddenly it’s not a big USB key, it’s a tiny external SSD.