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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.

Who sells PCIe SSD sticks for 350$? Maybe you are referring to SATA3 SSD's which are not the same as the ones used in this box.
 
Mixed results, but mostly bad, with LaCie

My main problem with LaCie has been their power supplies. Maybe it is where I live, but I have had several of their drives and all but the first one have had pwer supply issues. I always use a UPS with surge suppressor.

I've also had issues with OSX Software RAID, but it may have been related to the problems with the power supplies. I'm finally in a position to play with it again.

OWC has this little item: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MRP1UF8U3EP for $400, no disks. It isn't Thunderbolt, but it holds 4 drives which you can configure in a lot of different arrangements. Has anyone used this? For me, having one power cord and one data cord for 4 drives that can still be used separately is very attractive.
 
Until Thunderbolt prices get in line with USB, it's always a non-sale for me. $50 more over USB, ok, I'll bite, but not at $200+ more.
 
Who sells PCIe SSD sticks for 350$? Maybe you are referring to SATA3 SSD's which are not the same as the ones used in this box.

They are just trolling

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Until Thunderbolt prices get in line with USB, it's always a non-sale for me. $50 more over USB, ok, I'll bite, but not at $200+ more.


You also need to understand what you are evaluating. USB can't reach this speed, it works in packets, it is inefficient, you can't daisy chain.
If you are a PRO you should know these things otherwise you are just trolling.
 
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.

Who said its over priced? What other TB 2 options do you have? It may be more expensive than your needs but thats a different story.

How can a part time employer store data for you???? Great logic.
 
While this looks cool though likely expensive, I am much more interested in options for empty multiple drive enclosures. Hopefully we'll see a lot more of those fairly soon.


case = $10, Lightning chip = $20.

Assuming that were true that would mean someone could offer an empty TB2 case for $30. Since there's nothing close to that, either your estimate is off or every other company is scheming the customer as much as you think lacie is.

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.

The version that saves $300 would be connected via SATA which is only about 600MB per second in a recent PC and 300 in the tower mac pro. To match these speeds you'd need to connect via PCIe, try pricing those out and you'll get a very different number.
 
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.

You do know that RAID 0 is for speed, not redundancy ? If your data is critical, one typically doesn't use RAID 0. If you absolutely need the speed, then use the RAID 0 for the operation, then commit the data to a more robust storage. ;)

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My main problem with LaCie has been their power supplies. Maybe it is where I live, but I have had several of their drives and all but the first one have had pwer supply issues. I always use a UPS with surge suppressor.

I've also had issues with OSX Software RAID, but it may have been related to the problems with the power supplies. I'm finally in a position to play with it again.

OWC has this little item: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MRP1UF8U3EP for $400, no disks. It isn't Thunderbolt, but it holds 4 drives which you can configure in a lot of different arrangements. Has anyone used this? For me, having one power cord and one data cord for 4 drives that can still be used separately is very attractive.

RAID 10 is a sweet option, you can have 2 groups of RAID 0 combined to raid 1. You get redundancy and speed.
 
You do know that RAID 0 is for speed, not redundancy ? If your data is critical, one typically doesn't use RAID 0. If you absolutely need the speed, then use the RAID 0 for the operation, then commit the data to a more robust storage. ;)

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RAID 10 is a sweet option, you can have 2 groups of RAID 0 combined to raid 1. You get redundancy and speed.

Very true, but traditional RAID requires identical disks. When you have a collection of differently sized drives, an enclosure like this becomes much more attractive.
 
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.
Just to be clear, the box is doing the volume management, not the OS, right?
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.

Well, yeah, with nonredundant striping your MTTF is half that of an individual disk. As for OSX's software striping, I've never used it. Too bad they didn't proceed with ZFS, that would have been killer.

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RAID 10 is a sweet option, you can have 2 groups of RAID 0 combined to raid 1. You get redundancy and speed.

Striped mirrors are generally better than mirrored stripes - more tolerance of failures. "RAID10" I've seen applied to both approaches, but the former is much more common.
 
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.

As someone who has access to SSDs at wholesale, I can tell you there would only be a ~$25 margin on a $250 SSD. Wholesale on them isn't what you think it is. Price fixing very much exists in that market, no matter how much Micron and others say it doesn't.
 
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.

The version that saves $300 would be connected via SATA which is only about 600MB per second in a recent PC and 300 in the tower mac pro. To match these speeds you'd need to connect via PCIe, try pricing those out and you'll get a very different number.

Whoops, facts strike again.
 
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.

**Removed**

Repeated what everyone already said
 
For those of you who are trolling about this being overpriced or the Mac Pro being overpriced please skip this post.

For the rest of you...

IO performance is critical for my work.i also need a min of 800gb. Thus I ordered a Mac Pro w/1tb ssd because it offers both. But now that this is going to be released.. How much overhead is OSX itself and would it be better using one of these vs using the internal Mac Pro drive?

If the former, I could probably put a 256 in the Mac Pro (os, music, etc) and use Lacie for performance-needed data. This seems more expensive up front. Or should I just stick with Mac Pro ssd and add on a Lacie later if needed.

Also, how bad will these slow down with usage (I know it's not as much of an issue with trim) as opposed to say the pciex in the Mac Pro?

I know a lot of this is unknown, but that's why I'm posting this on a rumors site, so feel free.

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Those are 240gb. So you will need 4 of those to make a 1tb. So $1400 w/o an enclosure and taking up 4 pcie slots?
 
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.

but then i couldnt grab it and bring it with me. grab-and-go is a feature, not a bug.

additionally, TB2 will surely be in future versions of iMac and Macbooks, neither of which will readily allow for these to be installed internally. LaCie will want to sell them to any device owner, not just the nMP.

but dont worry, im sure you can find some other reasons to whine about apple products not being what you want them to be. but may i suggest -- instead of whining, why not start your own garage company and build the future you want? steve jobs did, and look how that worked out.
 
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Who said its over priced? What other TB 2 options do you have? It may be more expensive than your needs but thats a different story.

How can a part time employer store data for you???? Great logic.

For $430 more you can get the 8TB four bay TB2 Pegasus2 raid array. If you are already spending 1k why not the extra $430 and get something that really works.
 
Don't tell people the truth. They want to live in their Apple fairy land.

and some people like to live in a world where they think they know more than everybody else and everyone shares their use cases and world views.

thankfully, we dont.
 
For those of you who are trolling about this being overpriced or the Mac Pro being overpriced please skip this post.

For the rest of you...

IO performance is critical for my work.i also need a min of 800gb. Thus I ordered a Mac Pro w/1tb ssd because it offers both. But now that this is going to be released.. How much overhead is OSX itself and would it be better using one of these vs using the internal Mac Pro drive?

If the former, I could probably put a 256 in the Mac Pro (os, music, etc) and use Lacie for performance-needed data. This seems more expensive up front. Or should I just stick with Mac Pro ssd and add on a Lacie later if needed.

Also, how bad will these slow down with usage (I know it's not as much of an issue with trim) as opposed to say the pciex in the Mac Pro?

I know a lot of this is unknown, but that's why I'm posting this on a rumors site, so feel free.

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Those are 240gb. So you will need 4 of those to make a 1tb. So $1400 w/o an enclosure and taking up 4 pcie slots?

What type of work do you do? If you are king video editing having the media on the same drive as the application slows things down. It sounds like speed is an issue for you. What I have been recommending to people is Promise Technologies Pegasus2 Raid array. There is a diskless model you can get, but the 8TB 4 disk version goes for $1430. I'm getting the 12TB 6 disk version myself.
 
Assuming that were true that would mean someone could offer an empty TB2 case for $30.

no, that would only be materials cost. the company would then have to add all their overhead -- rent, utilities, engineering, marketing, HR, then *profit* on top of those costs, etc etc...

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thats only 240gb. youd need 4+ of them to get 1TB. that's a minimum of $1400 assuming you only get 4.
 
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What type of work do you do? If you are king video editing having the media on the same drive as the application slows things down. It sounds like speed is an issue for you. What I have been recommending to people is Promise Technologies Pegasus2 Raid array. There is a diskless model you can get, but the 8TB 4 disk version goes for $1430. I'm getting the 12TB 6 disk version myself.

Lots of Windows programming using vmware fusion. The machines inside run oracle, sql, sap, etc with very large databases and I build different applications around those environments and eventually just send back the vm image(s) to companies so they do not ever need to install/set anything up. The performance part of it is needed because when running huge queries/analyzation/mining even having an extra 100/mbs will make a 4 hour analysis run in 2.

Seems weird that I use Mac, but for whatever reason, benchmarks show virtualization works much better on mac & linux as opposed to windows (even if you benchmark headless hyperv). Also, I love Mac and having just one machine to close the ecosystem is great. Not to mention I do iPhone/Ipad development for fun.

So...

I ordered the 8-core 32gb (thinking I might upgrade to 64, still haven't decided), so neither memory or cores is a problem. But having 2-3 of these running at the same time, they become very IO chatting. So it's not constant read/write since fusion queues those in memory and then dumps the data in blocks, but within an hour you will have 10-20 gigs written to/read from. Then you get into snapshots which I use often so test and then rollback changes, on average these are about 16gb written & read. Otherwise everything sits mostly ideal if I'm working on smaller stuff.

Separate drive makes more sense, but at the same time I like the idea of just having a mac with nothing connected to it (other than monitors). Also, my VM's come and go, and needed drive space goes from 400 to 800 and sometimes I have to use an external if some company has a huge 800gb image (extremely rare).

That and the price difference will be big and unnecessary. Even if say the Lacie is $1000 (I think it will be more because of pcie drives) and I buy a Mac Pro 256gb, it's more expensive then just getting the Mac Pro with 1TB

But sounds like you have experience, is it worth having a separate drive? Does it help with performance, etc? I know you don't work directly with large VM's but I can imagine it would be very similar to video editing/streaming or maybe a scratch drive.
 
Lots of Windows programming using vmware fusion. The machines inside run oracle, sql, sap, etc with very large databases and I build different applications around those environments and eventually just send back the vm image(s) to companies so they do not ever need to install/set anything up. The performance part of it is needed because when running huge queries/analyzation/mining even having an extra 100/mbs will make a 4 hour analysis run in 2.

Seems weird that I use Mac, but for whatever reason, benchmarks show virtualization works much better on mac & linux as opposed to windows (even if you benchmark headless hyperv). Also, I love Mac and having just one machine to close the ecosystem is great. Not to mention I do iPhone/Ipad development for fun.

So...

I ordered the 8-core 32gb (thinking I might upgrade to 64, still haven't decided), so neither memory or cores is a problem. But having 2-3 of these running at the same time, they become very IO chatting. So it's not constant read/write since fusion queues those in memory and then dumps the data in blocks, but within an hour you will have 10-20 gigs written to/read from. Then you get into snapshots which I use often so test and then rollback changes, on average these are about 16gb written & read. Otherwise everything sits mostly ideal if I'm working on smaller stuff.

Separate drive makes more sense, but at the same time I like the idea of just having a mac with nothing connected to it (other than monitors). Also, my VM's come and go, and needed drive space goes from 400 to 800 and sometimes I have to use an external if some company has a huge 800gb image (extremely rare).

That and the price difference will be big and unnecessary. Even if say the Lacie is $1000 (I think it will be more because of pcie drives) and I buy a Mac Pro 256gb, it's more expensive then just getting the Mac Pro with 1TB

But sounds like you have experience, is it worth having a separate drive? Does it help with performance, etc? I know you don't work directly with large VM's but I can imagine it would be very similar to video editing/streaming or maybe a scratch drive.

Sounds like there are some similarities between the two workflows yes. It sounds like you don't have the backup or large long term storage needs that I would have so you wouldn't need a ton of storage. I would tell you to get the diskless option of the Pegasus two $700 at the apple store (may be cheaper elsewhere) and then just put like 1TB drives in it. Should be faster than the Lacie and have more storage as well. Stripe it to RAID 0 since you don't need any backup and it will run faster. It should in theory be faster than the Lacie, but I haven't seen any speed tests on the 4 disk version. I've seen tests on the 6 disk that make me believe that in real world use it will be as fast if not faster, but give you more flexibility and ability to expand storage in the future if needed. One drawback of the Pegasus2 is that it does not support SSDs currently.
 
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