LaCie has announced the world's fastest consumer-grade external storage solution today, dubbed the Little Big Disk. Inside the flagship portable drive you'll find two PCI Gen 2 solid state drives, each with a capacity of 500 GB for a total of 1 TB, that can be connected to a computer through Thunderbolt 2.

The Little Big Disk is pre-configured for RAID 0, which will allow read speeds of a whopping 1,375 MB/s and write speeds up to 1,180 MB/s: more than double what an internal SATA solid state drive is capable of. With transfer speeds this fast (up to 11 Gbps), Thunderbolt 2's 20 Gbps maximum data rate is required as the drive surpasses both USB 3.0 (5 Gbps) and SATA revision 3.0 (6 Gbps).

LaCie has 4K video editing in mind for the Little Big Disk, a task which requires a lot of storage that can be accessed in a flash. There's two Thunderbolt 2 ports on the back of the drive, which allows another five Thunderbolt devices and a 4K display to be daisy-chained together and connected to a computer with a single cable.

The compact drive, with two finned aluminum plates for heat dissipation and a fan that is only activated occasionally, isn't going to be cheap. LaCie has listed the retail price at $1,299 (and it's available now), although there are a few other Thunderbolt (1) drives available at a lesser cost. There are 2 TB and 4 TB HDD models for $419 and $599 respectively, a $419 512 GB SSD model, plus a $999 1 TB SSD unit.