LaCie d2 External Hard Drives Upgraded With Thunderbolt Ports

It's great to finally see Thunderbolt trickling down to consumer price levels. Not a steal, but for a quality, well-designed product it's not too bad at all.

Wait don't sayt it. Cable's not included?

The Bulge said:

What don't sayt it. Cable's not included?

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the cable IS INCLUDED!!!

Box Content:
LaCie d2 USB 3.0 Thunderbolt Series
* USB 3.0 cable (USB 2.0 compatible)
* Thunderbolt cable
* Drive stand for upright use
* Rubber feet for horizontal use
* External power supply
* Quick Install Guide
* CD with User Manual and software

dlastmango said:

the cable is included!!!

Box content:
Lacie d2 usb 3.0 thunderbolt series
* usb 3.0 cable (usb 2.0 compatible)
* thunderbolt cable
* drive stand for upright use
* rubber feet for horizontal use
* external power supply
* quick install guide
* cd with user manual and software

Click to expand...

omg

Not a bad price considering the $50 thunderbolt cable is included. However, I'm skeptical of the 180 MB/s speeds... And is too much to ask for two thunderbolt ports for those of us that need to daisy chain?

Thunderbolt pricing is improving.

As the article mentions, spinning drives cannot keep up but Thunderbolt does open the option doing a RAID across external drives and not being bus limited.

Even considering the inclusion of Thunderbolt cable, the drive is at least $100 overpriced. The fact is made worse considering USB 3.0 offers more than plenty speed for hard disks. Macs with USB 2.0 (but without FireWire) may benefit from this drive, but even still, I rather spring $29 for Thunderbolt to FireWire adapter and be done with it.

Still i wonder if this is a normal Thunderbolt cable or some sort of proprietary connector on one end and normal Thunderbolt on the other?

And another worthless thunderbolt device with only ONE TB port.

Sorry, I need to daisy chain my TB devices, Lacie.

iVoid said:

And another worthless thunderbolt device with only ONE TB port.

Sorry, I need to daisy chain my TB devices, Lacie.

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Damn. Not a wise decision. It could be a limitation of the cheaper TB chipset.

Johnny Vegas said:

Not a bad price considering the $50 thunderbolt cable is included. However, I'm skeptical of the 180 MB/s speeds... And is too much to ask for two thunderbolt ports for those of us that need to daisy chain?

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Maybe if you only write for.. half a second

The price is improving. However USB 3.0 HDDs are going for under $150 and have over 100MB per second throughput. Thunderbolt is hard to justify unless you have a MBA, 2011 MBP or 2011 iMac. Thunderbolt for a external RAID or SSD makes sense, but for HDD.. not so much if you can swing USB 3.0.

I'd pick one up though if it gets close to $200... since I have a 2011 MBP

EDIT:
Wait! 1 Thunderbolt port, I'd pass. I'm not doing the monitor/drive swap thing That makes me sad.

The photo shows 3 stacked, USB 3.0 I guess. Thunderbolt is turning out to a sad joke for most consumers.

Good to finally see Thunderbolt prices dropping. Maybe by the next time I'm in the market for a new drive I'll actually be able to afford TB. For now FW800 is fast enough for my editing and USB 2.0 is good enough for backups.

Edit: Unfortunately I also only just noticed the one thunderbolt port. Some of us need that second monitor and don't want to spend $1000 for the apple thunderbolt display. Daisy chain is a key.

I guess like any Mac you're paying for more than the basic specs, you pay for quality given the fact you can get USB3 drives from WD and Seagate at a fraction of the price and it will do just as good a job.

ETA - I'm looking at getting a 1.5Tb Seagate GoFlex with USB3 for less than $80AU to backup my 1Tb Fusion iMac when it gets here.

nutmac said:

Even considering the inclusion of Thunderbolt cable, the drive is at least $100 overpriced. The fact is made worse considering USB 3.0 offers more than plenty speed for hard disks. Macs with USB 2.0 (but without FireWire) may benefit from this drive, but even still, I rather spring $29 for Thunderbolt to FireWire adapter and be done with it.

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I'm not sure there are many $199 drives that are going to deliver the metal chassis, kensington lock, software and more that the D2 lineup has.

Sure you can buy a cheap plastic drive at Best Buy but the D2 lineup has been pretty solid for Lacie over the years.

...

Lancer said:

I guess like any Mac you're paying for more than the basic specs, you pay for quality given the fact you can get USB3 drives from WD and Seagate at a fraction of the price and it will do just as good a job.

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Yes you can but you are also getting what you pay for. TB doesn't require the CPU utilization that USB does.

There are many things you can do in life but efficiency is going to vary depending on the needs of the individual.

Kind of funny seeing hard drives referred to now as "legacy" devices.

nuckinfutz said:

Yes you can but you are also getting what you pay for. TB doesn't require the CPU utilization that USB does.

There are many things you can do in life but efficiency is going to vary depending on the needs of the individual.

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I have a 2012 Mac mini server (dual core i5) that drives a USB 3.0 drive at 80 MB per second as a Time Machine Drive via ethernet and 2 GB virtualbox VM and the CPU doesn't come above 25%. I'd guess that driving 100 MB per second on a quad core i7 would use less than 10% CPU via USB 3.0. Thats pretty much a non issue and not worth paying a 100% markup for.

The promise of thunderbolt was 1 cable that could connect to multiple devices and push data as fast the devices can handle it. Thunderbolt does do that but the premium is outrageous, the cost is 2 - 3 times USB 3.0. For the vast majority of people, USB 3.0 makes thunderbolt a non starter. That is the problem. (Again, all my opinion)

wgnoyes said:

Kind of funny seeing hard drives referred to now as "legacy" devices.

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They are. Linus Torvalds predicts they'll be going the way of the tape drive shortly.

nutmac said:

I rather spring $29 for Thunderbolt to FireWire adapter and be done with it.

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FireWire 800 gets you somewhere around 80-90MB/s, which is far slower than this drive.

chuckles:) said:

They are. Linus Torvalds predicts they'll be going the way of the tape drive shortly.

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Not in his lifetime.

Penn Jennings said:

The promise of thunderbolt was 1 cable that could connect to multiple devices and push data as fast the devices can handle it. Thunderbolt does do that but the premium is outrageous, the cost is 2 - 3 times USB 3.0. For the vast majority of people, USB 3.0 makes thunderbolt a non starter. That is the problem. (Again, all my opinion)

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Yes that's the point really. There's too much crapping up of Thunderbolt threads from people that clearly don't need it. You're happy with USB 3.0 that's great but for a video editor or other vertical markets the added price is inconsequential.

The Bulge said:

Not in his lifetime.

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Yes, flash memory will overtake hard drives. Here's why: flash memory roughly follows Moore's Law. Disk drives don't. So while disk density is increasing, flash density is increasing *much* faster. Follow the math, and you will realize that at some point within ten years, flash will be cheaper, larger, and faster than spinning rust.

Well, considering I recently picked up a 4TB USB 3.0 external HDD (WD My Book) for $199, which is probably pretty close to the speed of the LaCie, I'd say it's NOT worth double the price.

I like LaCie, and I have two of their older FW800/eSATA models, but I don't like them *that* much.