LaCie Brings (more) Affordable Thunderbolt Storage to Macs with Little Big Disk, Available in Retail

At IDF I met with LaCie and got a quick demo of its Little Big Disk Thunderbolt storage solution. The heavy metal chassis is home to two 2.5" drive bays, which come populated with either two HDDs or two SSDs. The HDD version is available in 1TB (2 x 500GB) and 2TB (2 x 1TB) capacities, priced at $399 and $499 respectively. The SSD options are TBD. LaCie will not be offering a BYOD version unfortunately.

The drives ship in RAID-0 however the Little Big Disk doesn't have any internal RAID controllers (just SATA), the array is enabled through OS X's Disk Utility in software (RAID-0/1 and JBOD are supported). LaCie promises sequential read performance of up to 480MB/s with SSDs and 190MB/s with HDDs.

The Little Big Disk requires an external power supply and it can daisy chain up to 6 more Thunderbolt devices for a total of 8 (Mac + LBD + up to 6 more TB devices). 

The big news here is that LaCie will be offering the Little Big Disk in retail and etail through Apple. So far you could only purchase Promise's Pegasus through Apple's online store (although I hear that's going to change soon).