AKITIO (www.akitio.com) has unveiled the Thunder3 PCIe SSD, which it says is the industry’s fastest external storage solution. Developed for high-speed transfer of large files, the Thunder3 PCIe SSD combines the full PCIe Gen3 x4 bandwidth of Intel’s 750 NVMe SSD with Thunderbolt 3’s 40Gbps port, offering performance of 2500MB/s (2.5 Gigabytes per second) with a storage capacity of 1.2TB.

About 8x faster than USB 3.1 Gen 1, the Thunder3 PCIe SSD is designed for consumers and professionals who desire high capacity external storage with unmatched data transfer speeds, says Richard Wright, vice president of Sales & Marketing for Akitio. It features two Thunderbolt 3 Ports as well as a DisplayPort video output to connect the latest 4K displays. 

The second Thunderbolt 3 port operates the same as a Thunderbolt 3 computer port by supporting USB 3.1 (up to 10Gb/s), DisplayPort monitor or up to five daisy chained Thunderbolt 3 devices. It gives Sony Vegas, Adobe Premier, Photoshop and Lightroom, Corel VideoStudio, Pinnacle Studio and other users the ability to edit and playback multiple streams of HD and/or 4K content or manage thousands of RAW photographs, says Wright. Up to six Thunder3 PCIe SSDs can be daisy-chained together for increased storage capacity. The Akitio Thunder3 PCIe SSD will be available in the second quarter for $1,299.