We’ve been waiting months for a consumer-priced Thunderbolt drive to go up for sale, and it looks like the most affordable option yet has finally been released. LaCie’s Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series Hard Drives ($400-$500) should be hitting the shelves at bricks-and-mortar Apple Stores across the globe, and they’re now available from Apple’s online store with a shipping time of one to two weeks.
The 7200rpm drives—available in 1TB or 2TB—come with a preconfigured RAID0 striped set. They connect over Thunderbolt, which has a maximum 10Gb/sec transfer rate, though due to the speeds of the disks inside Little Big Disk, you’ll actually see read speeds closer to 190MB/s. And two Thunderbolt ports on each drive’s back means that you can use one port to connect to your computer, and daisy chain more drives off of the other for additional storage space and speeds closer to 800MB/s. Be warned: neither drive includes the $50 Thunderbolt cable; you’ll still have to pick that one up yourself. As for the 250GB and 500GBs solid state drive models, they’re coming in October and will have read speeds in the 480MB/s range.