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CES 2014: LaCie Debuts 'Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2' With Transfer Speeds Up to 1375 MB/s

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LaCie today announced the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2, one of the first external hard drives that will support Intel's new Thunderbolt 2 specification to deliver transfer speeds of up to 1375 MB/s, significantly faster than USB 3.0 drives.

Little Big Disk includes two 500 GB PCIe solid state drives from Samsung in a Raid-0 configuration and is able to support mobile streaming and editing of both 4K and 3D video. The drive features a fully aluminum enclosure with a Mac Pro-style black finish along with an optimized interior design that improves cooling efficiency.

lacielittlebigdisk.jpg
The drive includes a thermoregulated fan that turns on only when necessary, producing little to no noise, and it also ships with an included Thunderbolt cable and a three year warranty.

AnandTech has posted a mini review of the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2, and in testing, found 1400 MB/s in sequential read speed along with 1100 MB/s write speed. Engadget saw similar results at CES, observing write speeds of 1200 MB/s and read speeds of 1300Mb/s. A 300 GB file transferred in approximately four minutes.
Thankfully, the drives that were set up ahead of our arrival, and had been sorting files for some time, remained at nearly room temp. With two of the Thunderbolt 2 drives set up in RAID 0, we witnessed 2,000 MB/s write speeds and 2,600 MB/s read numbers.
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The LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2 will be available during the first quarter of 2014 from LaCie.com. Pricing has yet to be announced.

Article Link: CES 2014: LaCie Debuts 'Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2' With Transfer Speeds Up to 1375 MB/s
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2014/01/05/ces-2014-lacie-debuts-little-big-disk-thunderbolt-2-with-transfer-speeds-up-to-1375-mbs/
This is one of those things where if you have to ask how much it is, you can't afford it. You probably don't need it, either. But hey, a guy can dream.
 
Awesome performance in RAID 0, but golly gosh, all my experience with OSX software RAID 0 has ended in the data eventually becoming corrupted, and strange behaviour. I'd be more likely to run this as two separate 500GB volumes. Literally EVERY time I have used RAID 0 for anything important, it's resulted in failure.
 
scottrichardson said:
Awesome performance in RAID 0, but golly gosh, all my experience with OSX software RAID 0 has ended in the data eventually becoming corrupted, and strange behaviour. I'd be more likely to run this as two separate 500GB volumes. Literally EVERY time I have used RAID 0 for anything important, it's resulted in failure.
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Really.. I've been on raid 0 since 2008 and never had 1 issue.
 
What the cost...

500GB SSDs are about $350 retail. LaCie can get them OEM so they'll pay quite a bit less. Let's assume it's $250 per drive: 2 x SSD = $500, case = $10, Lightning chip = $20. Total = $530. Knowing LaCie, they will sell this for $1000.

Not that they have solid reputation to begin with. My friend had a "Porsche-designed" external HDD that failed in 5 months. The replacement failed after 2 months. And after that, he just bought another one.
 
zoffdino said:
500GB SSDs are about $350 retail. LaCie can get them OEM so they'll pay quite a bit less. Let's assume it's $250 per drive: 2 x SSD = $500, case = $10, Lightning chip = $20. Total = $530. Knowing LaCie, they will sell this for $1000.

Not that they have solid reputation to begin with. My friend had a "Porsche-designed" external HDD that failed in 5 months. The replacement failed after 2 months. And after that, he just bought another one.
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That is why I would rather spend the extra $430 and get a 8TB (4 disk) Pegasus2 raid5 array.
 
I might buy one of these. My original Thunderbolt Little Big Disk has been great. I'd love it if this one cut out the constant fan noise.
 
pgiguere1 said:
Let me guess, $999?
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The current Thunderbolt (1) Little Big Disk with 1TB SSD costs $999.95 at the Apple Store and at Amazon. I am hoping the price stays the same.

From reading through the reviews, it seems the only issues from the current version were fan noise and heat, so I also hope Lacie fixed all that.
 
Never really cared for the styling of LaCie's products. Why do they have that ugly eyeball shaped button on all their stuff? I like the look of G-Tech's hard drives though.
 
zoffdino said:
500GB SSDs are about $350 retail. LaCie can get them OEM so they'll pay quite a bit less. Let's assume it's $250 per drive: 2 x SSD = $500, case = $10, Lightning chip = $20. Total = $530. Knowing LaCie, they will sell this for $1000.
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If you can get these for $700 (2x$350) retail, if you had a PC (or old Mac Pro) you would save $300 by installing internally. So this is a $300 tax for having the new small Mac Pro.
 
They are using PCIe SSD, not SATA3. Regular SATA3 SSD's go up to 500MB/sec so with two of them you can't break 1000MB/sec.

So you can't simply buy bigger drives and put them in I suppose.
 
ouimetnick said:
Why do they have that ugly eyeball shaped button on all their stuff? I like the look of G-Tech's hard drives though.
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What? Never seen 2001: Space Odyssey? ;)

And why does G-Technology always have that big "G" logo on their stuff too? Not being a smart ass but I'll take the eye over the G.
 
Are people generally satisfied with LaCie drives?

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fermat-au said:
If you can get these for $700 (2x$350) retail, if you had a PC (or old Mac Pro) you would save $300 by installing internally. So this is a $300 tax for having the new small Mac Pro.
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Don't tell people the truth. They want to live in their Apple fairy land. :D
 
nick_elt said:
This isnt for the average home consumer so even if it is $1k, so what?
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Because businesses don't turn a profit by overpaying for everything they buy.

At last count I had about 70TB worth of external hard drives. Based on your logic, If each of those cost $1000 and were $300 overpriced, I'd have pissed away $21,000. I could hire a part time employee for that and it would be more productive than a Lacie external drive.

When you have a business and are buying these things all the time, it's even more important to get good value.
 
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