News - LaCie teases a Little Big Disk with Thunderbolt

[HEXUS]

500GB external drive promises "astonishingly fast transfer rates" later this year.

Read more.

[spoon_]

That speed is just sick for external drive... :S

[watercooled]

It's not going to happen with HDDs, they will be the bottleneck don't forget. That's probably the peak speed from buffer-buffer.

But the speed should be near enough the same as an internal drive anyway.

[duc]

It's not going to happen with HDDs, they will be the bottleneck don't forget. That's probably the peak speed from buffer-buffer.

But the speed should be near enough the same as an internal drive anyway.

These are SSDs in RAID0 configuration.

[watercooled]

Yeah but who would use SSDs in one? You'd need to match or exceed the throughput with your internal drives for it to be worth while.
I know I'm just being pedantic but it annoys me when companies use stuff like that as selling points, some people will listen and think they'll get that speed with a single 80GB HDD or something in it.

[Barakka]

Yeah but who would use SSDs in one? You'd need to match or exceed the throughput with your internal drives for it to be worth while.

Not necessarily, I mean aside from the fact that the only machines cable of connecting to it are MBPs which can all be had with SSD system drives, it's more about the application.

A lot of this ThunderBolt stuff will be targeting the Sound and Vision industries where external drive speed is essential. As it stands now it's the external storage drive in which the speed counts, more than the system drive as that's where you're writing the data to. Writing upwards of 10 channels of 48k/24bit BWAV takes some serious bandwidth to the drives and is one of the potential bottlenecks especially when you start thinking how many channels you can fit with a 10Gbps pipe to the interface.