Earlier this afternoon at Storage Visions 2012, a sideshow preceding CES 2012 that deals exclusively with emerging technology trends and architectures in storage technology, OCZ unveiled a few new products that the company has planned for release over the course of the year.

Image Credit: PC Perspective

The first and most interesting consumer product we saw was the OCZ Lightfoot external SATA hard drive. Lightfoot is essentially a successor to the OCZ Enyo external USB 3.0 SSD and the physical footprint of the new device is slightly bigger due to its increased storage capacity. The device utilizes an Intel Thunderbolt port to transfer data bidirectionally with transfer rates as high as ~750MB/s according to OCZ representatives.

During the unveiling, OCZ stated that the main benefit of migrating to Intel's Thunderbolt technology is the improved latency and highly accurate time synchronizations that will allow for transferring high-bandwidth video and audio content to and from the drive. Nevertheless, we are still awaiting more hardware manufacturers to license Intel's Thunderbolt technology so the ecosystem of products can emerge and a successful generation of high-performance data can be realized.



Image Credit: PC Perspective

OCZ did not comment on pricing or a release date for the Lightfood external SATA HDD, other than it will be released in 2012.