LaCie Intros 2big Thunderbolt And eSATA Hub Thunderbolt At CES

Thunderbolt clearly is the port to beat at this year's CES, and LaCie is announcing their latest peripherals at the show. There's the new 2big Thunderbolt Series and the eSATA Hub Thunderbolt series, the latter of which allows users to connect external eSATA drives to their Macs. With speeds up to three times faster than FireWire 800, the LaCie 2big also features RAID security, hot-swappable disks, daisy chain convenience and a solid-aluminum casing. Heavy data users will appreciate capacities up to 8TB with jaw-dropping transfer rates up to 311MB/s. Daisy chaining multiple 2bigs even increases overall performance.

The eSATA Hub Thunderbolt Series gives new life to existing eSATA drives with Thunderbolt innovation and backward compatibility. It connects to a late-model Mac via the Thunderbolt port and features two eSATA ports. This lets the user connect two eSATA external hard drives to the Hub and get full eSATA speeds on their new Mac. The Hub also features a second Thunderbolt port that lets the user connect other Thunderbolt peripherals. This means up to 12 eSATA drives (6x Dock, 2x eSATA links per Hub) can be connected via a single connection to a Mac with full eSATA 3Gb/s speeds.

The 2big Thunderbolt Series and eSATA Hub Thunderbolt Series will be available in the first quarter of 2012, but no pricing information is available just yet. Better budget for a T-bolt cable, too.