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

[milo]

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...

I agree with you. My point was how ridiculous it was for that guy to insist that the cost of an enclosure and TB2 interface was only $30. We need some more reasonably priced TB and TB2 drives and enclosures, but it's not anywhere close to those numbers yet.

Right. I have a 4k sample video thats only 4 minutes long, and its 900MB.

That sounds low (and that would mean 4000 minutes of 4k, which wouldn't be too bad). Probably highly compressed, 4k footage used for editing could be much bigger than that.

 

[aloshka]

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.

Are you talking about http://store.apple.com/us/product/H...kless-4bay-thunderbolt-2-raid-system?fnode=5f ? Except the newer TB2 version?

Very interesting. I hate that it's that big, but performance & space is important. I also wonder, how can spindle drives be faster than dual raid0 ssd's even if there is four of them. Spec wise the SSD is still faster (the original Lacie benchmarks vs the Pegasus 2 with spindles)... actually the mac pro ssd is even faster than both, but not by much (1.5 vs 1.4 on the lacie version 2). The other thing to note, the LaCie says average speeds of 1.4 which means it could technically be faster at peek writes (the snapshot images are a direct dump so VERY compressible).

Makes you wonder what 10k drives would do in the Pegasus 2. Loud, but will be a fast performer.

I think I'm still leaning on LaCie or Mac Pro internal drive.

 

[Stephent]

Are you talking about http://store.apple.com/us/product/H...kless-4bay-thunderbolt-2-raid-system?fnode=5f ? Except the newer TB2 version?

Very interesting. I hate that it's that big, but performance & space is important. I also wonder, how can spindle drives be faster than dual raid0 ssd's even if there is four of them. Spec wise the SSD is still faster (the original Lacie benchmarks vs the Pegasus 2 with spindles)... actually the mac pro ssd is even faster than both, but not by much (1.5 vs 1.4 on the lacie version 2). The other thing to note, the LaCie says average speeds of 1.4 which means it could technically be faster at peek writes (the snapshot images are a direct dump so VERY compressible).

Makes you wonder what 10k drives would do in the Pegasus 2. Loud, but will be a fast performer.

I think I'm still leaning on LaCie or Mac Pro internal drive.

It might be faster. Need to see real world comparisons. Guessing that the Lacie will be slower than the marketing number they gave out so it could be close or negligible depending on the task. You are right though the Pegasus w/10ks in it would fly. Can fit about 3 Lacies in the same space. Lot of variables in play here. If what you get accomplishes what you need not sure there is a wrong answer.

 

[aloshka]

It might be faster. Need to see real world comparisons. Guessing that the Lacie will be slower than the marketing number they gave out so it could be close or negligible depending on the task. You are right though the Pegasus w/10ks in it would fly. Can fit about 3 Lacies in the same space. Lot of variables in play here. If what you get accomplishes what you need not sure there is a wrong answer.

Very true. Check out the initial reviews of the Lacie2. It looks REALLY impressive. Also, what's weird is the mention that TB2 caps at 1500MBs in either direction. Technically that means it can write 1.5 gigabytes / sec. So a little over 13 seconds to copy a 20gb file—assuming that whatever drive can push TB2 to it's limit.

Also if you look at the benchmarks, pretty damn close to what they advertise. 1384MBs / sec

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7618/lacie-little-big-disk-thunderbolt-2-mini-review

Unless I'm reading it wrong.

 

[pgiguere1]

This isnt for the average home consumer so even if it is $1k, so what?

Nothing. It will only appeal to a very narrow target market, but that's fine.

Judging by the design they're clearly aiming new Mac Pro owners so it's not like LaCie is expecting anything else.

It was just genuinely estimating the price so people know what to expect.

 

[Stephent]

Very true. Check out the initial reviews of the Lacie2. It looks REALLY impressive. Also, what's weird is the mention that TB2 caps at 1500MBs in either direction. Technically that means it can write 1.5 gigabytes / sec. So a little over 13 seconds to copy a 20gb file—assuming that whatever drive can push TB2 to it's limit.

Also if you look at the benchmarks, pretty damn close to what they advertise. 1384MBs / sec

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7618/lacie-little-big-disk-thunderbolt-2-mini-review

Unless I'm reading it wrong.

interesting. Yea that would be significantly faster than the pegasus2 R4. Just say a review of the Pegasus on apples site that says they have gotten SSDs to work. so you could put 4 ssds in there for 1TB. Would be faster, but more expensive as well.

 

[aloshka]

interesting. Yea that would be significantly faster than the pegasus2 R4. Wish it had more storage, even two or three small projects for me could eat that up. Would't make a dent w/ 4k video. If the price is right maybe I'll get both

You can always chain them (expensive). Although if the pegasus is 700 w/o drives, adding 10k drives (similar performance, I think) it would cost more if not equal

 

[Stephent]

You can always chain them (expensive). Although if the pegasus is 700 w/o drives, adding 10k drives (similar performance, I think) it would cost more if not equal

Was just looking at the apple reviews and supposedly someone put in SSDs and it worked so 4 256gb drives striped would be about $300 more give or take, but would press the limits of TB2 in theory. Mind you that configuration isn't officially supported.

 

[aloshka]

Was just looking at the apple reviews and supposedly someone put in SSDs and it worked so 4 256gb drives striped would be about $300 more give or take, but would press the limits of TB2 in theory. Mind you that configuration isn't officially supported.

Or two lacies and each in its own port on the nMP. Not a seller of Lacie btw, just looks cool and performance is good.

Still haven't decided. External Lacie or internal tb on the nMP

 

[osx11]

Right. I have a 4k sample video thats only 4 minutes long, and its 900MB.

So less than 30GB for 2 hours. Doesn't a BlueRay movie require even more space?

 

[Stephent]

Or two lacies and each in its own port on the nMP. Not a seller of Lacie btw, just looks cool and performance is good.

Still haven't decided. External Lacie or internal tb on the nMP

The Lacie's are very nice looking, but in a dark edit bay even I look good. You probably don't have the monitoring needs I have that bus usage matters as much. Although you may find this interesting.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5918

 

[aloshka]

The Lacie's are very nice looking, but in a dark edit bay even I look good. You probably don't have the monitoring needs I have that bus usage matters as much. Although you may find this interesting.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5918

Yeah, I saw that from another thread. Very interesting. Even though I don't have 4k, I think I'd follow those rules anyway. Probably won't make a difference, or maybe it would. I don't think I'd run the Lacie Drive and then a TB display or something changed down. No reason they can't all have their own bus and connections. Although I have two apple tb displays, no reason they can't be daisy-chained unless it somehow affects which video card is connected to which port (i.e. say port 1 is connected to video card 1 and port 2 to video card 2). Then it probably makes sense to connect each monitor into it's own tb port.

Still the issue with LaCie. And I know what you mean by the dark, but I think it will be behind the monitors anyway, so not sure I care too much. What I mean by cool looking is that it's small and portable and not a huge device. Sounds like noise is really good on it too, as the original Lacie annoyed me with it's insanely loud fan.

But still... nMP internal or Lacie. Just not sure how big of a performance hit it is to use the same drive for OSX and all virtuals. If I'm really running towards crazy performance than each VM would get it's own drive. But since I don't want to do that, still begs the question. IS there even a difference in performance. Would it degrade the internal drive faster?

 

[Stephent]

Yeah, I saw that from another thread. Very interesting. Even though I don't have 4k, I think I'd follow those rules anyway. Probably won't make a difference, or maybe it would. I don't think I'd run the Lacie Drive and then a TB display or something changed down. No reason they can't all have their own bus and connections. Although I have two apple tb displays, no reason they can't be daisy-chained unless it somehow affects which video card is connected to which port (i.e. say port 1 is connected to video card 1 and port 2 to video card 2). Then it probably makes sense to connect each monitor into it's own tb port.

Still the issue with LaCie. And I know what you mean by the dark, but I think it will be behind the monitors anyway, so not sure I care too much. What I mean by cool looking is that it's small and portable and not a huge device. Sounds like noise is really good on it too, as the original Lacie annoyed me with it's insanely loud fan.

But still... nMP internal or Lacie. Just not sure how big of a performance hit it is to use the same drive for OSX and all virtuals. If I'm really running towards crazy performance than each VM would get it's own drive. But since I don't want to do that, still begs the question. IS there even a difference in performance. Would it degrade the internal drive faster?

well since SSD endurance i measured in Read/Write cycles using your internal drive to write out files will wear it out faster. Also since the nMP can handle 6 thunderbolt displays you can daisy chain two together and not see any issues. I believe bus 0 is one of the graphic cards not sure which the other connects to. Which graphics card did you get?

 

[aloshka]

well since SSD endurance i measured in Read/Write cycles using your internal drive to write out files will wear it out faster. Also since the nMP can handle 6 thunderbolt displays you can daisy chain two together and not see any issues. I believe bus 0 is one of the graphic cards not sure which the other connects to. Which graphics card did you get?

D500... I'm thinking I'll have to redo my order anyway. Not like it matters they all ship February.

Right now I have

8C 32GB 1TB SSD D500

Thinking I'll do 8C 64GB 256GB SSD D700 and buy the Lacie

Could by 16gb and buy OWC instead (200$ diff)

Is it worth the upgrade of the vid card.. I dont' do any graphic(s) work outside Photoshop & fusion (not sure this requires a good video card). I do occasional WoW gaming but it's been so annoying lately not sure I want to play games.

Thoughts?

 

[cclloyd]

So less than 30GB for 2 hours. Doesn't a BlueRay movie require even more space?

Blu Ray usually has 50mbps video quality. I've seen downloads that go around 50GB for "unchanged blu ray quality".

Blu Ray disks only go up to 50GB I think.

 

[Stephent]

D500... I'm thinking I'll have to redo my order anyway. Not like it matters they all ship February.

Right now I have

8C 32GB 1TB SSD D500

Thinking I'll do 8C 64GB 256GB SSD D700 and buy the Lacie

Could by 16gb and buy OWC instead (200$ diff)

Is it worth the upgrade of the vid card.. I dont' do any graphic(s) work outside Photoshop & fusion (not sure this requires a good video card). I do occasional WoW gaming but it's been so annoying lately not sure I want to play games.

Thoughts?

No unless you use a program that can offload its work to the GPU you won't see any difference. that is a big reason why the benchmarks haven't been all that impressive. Mind you as a bang for you buck upgrade it is a good one. One that many video professionals are doing.

 

[iLilana]

wow

this is nice. I would hope there will be a price point adjustment on the older SATA SSD version. or just discontinue it and continue on with the same price point. For my own personal needs I have too many things to buy this year. MOTU just came out with their 828x with TB and i need to save for the macpro with 1 TB installed and a couple of these or maybe 3. and I need a moog minitaur. so ya. i may be able to save it before I die of old age.

 

[wikiverse]

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.

You said that 'It isn't for the average home consumer, so if it is $1k, so what?"

Implying that business buyers do not care about costs, and will pay anything for convenience.

As a business owner who purchases large amounts of storage (currently 70TB of external hard drives), I can tell you that $1k is overpriced for a 1TB LaCie drive. That's $1/GB and realistically, the maximum theoretical read/write speeds won't be used in day-to-day operations.

There are better uses for that money which include hiring additional employees to increase productivity with the money saved by purchasing lower-cost TB1 drives from other manufacturers. The increase in work done by a new employee will be greater than the increase in productivity from the marginal increase in file transfer speeds from this drive.

You asked "so what?", as a non-'average home consumer' and the target demographic for a product like this, this drive is not a good-value purchase. That's what.

 

[clemento07]

Newegg.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820785002

That's 240GB only, on the LaCie, it is 2x 512GB.

 

[theluggage]

Implying that business buyers do not care about costs, and will pay anything for convenience.

Business buyers ought to be able to put a dollar value on convenience. It doesn't take long to recoup a few hundred extra tax-deductible bucks spent on a faster disk drive if you can save an employee 10 minutes a day.

For a business, the cost of computer hardware is a rounding error compared with the cost of the people who operate it. If you're nickel-and-diming employees on the hardware they reasonably need, you're doing it wrong.

Home users can't generally put a price on their own time or do profit/loss analysis on their hobbies.

 

[lozion]

D500... I'm thinking I'll have to redo my order anyway. Not like it matters they all ship February.

Right now I have

8C 32GB 1TB SSD D500

Thinking I'll do 8C 64GB 256GB SSD D700 and buy the Lacie

Could by 16gb and buy OWC instead (200$ diff)

Is it worth the upgrade of the vid card.. I dont' do any graphic(s) work outside Photoshop & fusion (not sure this requires a good video card). I do occasional WoW gaming but it's been so annoying lately not sure I want to play games.

Thoughts?

Imo, you probably wont see much difference going with the D500 or D700 if you are a casual user. Save 400$ by upgrading the base model and stick with the D300. After all you're still getting 2 good cards.

Here's my sweet spot:

3.5GHz 6-core
12GB (3x4GB)
512GB PCIe-based flash
Dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs

3587CAD$ after edu rebates. Save some cash by getting the RAM from OWC and buy that new Lacie drive

 

[aloshka]

Imo, you probably wont see much difference going with the D500 or D700 if you are a casual user. Save 400$ by upgrading the base model and stick with the D300. After all you're still getting 2 good cards.

Here's my sweet spot:

3.5GHz 6-core
12GB (3x4GB)
512GB PCIe-based flash
Dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs

3587CAD$ after edu rebates. Save some cash by getting the RAM from OWC and buy that new Lacie drive

This is going to sound really weird, but I've cancelled my order for the Mac Pro. I've been screwing around with an iMac + rMBP and I'm surprised how much they can pull as far as VM's go. I didn't know that Parallels and Fusion both use the new grandcentral for cpu processing. So you can assign 4 cores when you only have 4 cores to a vm and it will function without slowing anything down (unless it's capping all four cores, but then it's a problem even if you assign one core).

Anyway, testing them all, and I'm positive I don't want to spend a ton of money on the Mac Pro anymore. Maybe my needs were a lot small than I thought.

 

[wikiverse]

Business buyers ought to be able to put a dollar value on convenience. It doesn't take long to recoup a few hundred extra tax-deductible bucks spent on a faster disk drive if you can save an employee 10 minutes a day.

For a business, the cost of computer hardware is a rounding error compared with the cost of the people who operate it. If you're nickel-and-diming employees on the hardware they reasonably need, you're doing it wrong.

Home users can't generally put a price on their own time or do profit/loss analysis on their hobbies.

As a business buyer I am putting a dollar value on convenience. The truth is that in most real-world cases, this drive doesn't provide any significant efficiency for the extra cost. For a business purchasing one or two external hard drives, the added cost is negligible. But for a business that requires a significant number of external devices that can be moved around to various offices/locations/staff this is a bad investment.

As outlined in my original post, if this drive is $300 more than a competing drive and there is no significant productivity boost, then based on the 70TB of drives I have already, that is $21,000 of extra spend providing little-to-no real-world benefit. An additional employee would be more productive for the same money.

The original poster was implying that Business don't care about costs. Not just with this hard drive, but the cost of any hardware/software/stationary/furniture/printing. While not everyone is buying external drives in bulk, a 'few hundred extra bucks' on everything you buy adds up. The belief that 'costs don't matter' to business is just false.

 

[theluggage]

As outlined in my original post, if this drive is $300 more than a competing drive and there is no significant productivity boost

…but you're assuming that there is "no significant productivity boost".

If your staff are waiting for files to copy or video renders to complete, or if they have to jump through extra hoops because they can't play raw video from their old firewire drives then these drives are likely to represent a significant productivity boost that justifies the extra cash. If your staff aren't doing those things then they almost certainly don't need these drives - at any price. Duh!

Then based on the 70TB of drives I have already, that is $21,000 of extra spend providing little-to-no real-world benefit. An additional employee would be more productive for the same money.

Sorry. I don't live in the Capitalist Paradise and didn't realise that you could get a well qualified employee for just $7k a year (…assuming you'd get at least 3 years use out of these drives) including benefits, cost of training, cost of management, cost of equipment etc. (Personally, I work in a larger organisation where the recruitment process alone would probably cost more than $7k)

Also, nine women can't make a baby in a month - if your expensive creative professional needs a render job to finish before they can get on with their work, then employing a pimply faced youth to watch the hourglass for them isn't going to help.

That's assuming you'd need to replace all 70TB of storage with fast SSDs to get a productivity improvement. You'd probably want to target these at, e.g. employees doing video editing, or look at some sort of tiered-storage system.

The original poster was implying that Business don't care about costs.

Really? I think the point was that businesses can justify expensive hardware if it offers productivity improvements. Plenty of people have posted here to point out that these drives are probably irrelevant unless you're working with 4k or 3D video.

 

[lozion]

So has pricing being determined on this?