LaCie interview: "Thunderbolt can change the way we work"

Supports reported Thunderbolt can still be counted on the fingers of both hands. Among the few partners of Intel and Apple have shown that products include LaCie. The French manufacturer will launch this summer a hard drive "nomad" has two connectors Thunderbolt, the Little Big Disk. It will be offered in three versions, one with two SSD totaling 240 GB or 500 GB and 1 TB grind this time using standard hard drives at 7,200 rpm. LaCie yet refuses to give a price, but at least for the SSD it may be salted, "the high performance" modestly prefers to say the manufacturer. Which should gradually expand its range of products compatible Thunderbold.

More generally, this new connection could well upset certain habits installed in customers. This is one of the promises made by Erwan Girard, Business Unit Manager at LaCie. it deals with professional products, and as the Thunderbolt.

Birth of a partnership

LaCie's commitment goes back to the beginning of the presentation of Thunderbolt, then called Light Peak "We did a lot of technological monitoring to identify technologies that could make the difference in years to come. We also have a professional clientele who demand large storage capacity and performance. As he has used during his lectures, Intel made some demos of products with technical partners capable of developing an ecosystem around its new technologies. It was in the loop pretty quickly. The connection was interesting for us and in turn Apple was looking for people able to offer hard drives with the launch of their new machines.

Choosing the Little Big Disk

LaCie has a wide enough range of disk drives, but the choice to take the format of the Little Big Disk (already available with eSATA + USB + FireWire) won the light engine provided by Apple to launch Thunderbolt “The vector of this technology for now at Apple's MacBook Pro. It's a mobile solution, extremely powerful, rather for professionals creating content such as video artists and photographers. With 10 Gbp / s we thought we could do video editing on the move, transfer video at high speed. "

LBD-Thunderbolt_key

The differential speed promised by Thunderbolt is compared to existing solutions such as LaCie comes to rely on a few changes in clients' "We must realize that the Thunderbolt is faster than Fibre Channel is an optical technology used mainly in racks . We will find for example in many production companies to ensure a very high rate between a mounting station and a storage array. It was a bit ultimate technology to three weeks ago ... "