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LaCie Adds 2TB Option to Its 'Rugged' Thunderbolt/USB 3.0 Portable Drives

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LaCie has added a new entry to its Rugged series of portable storage drives, bringing a two terabyte 5400RPM option to its Thunderbolt/USB3 series.

Last year, LaCie rolled out its first portable Thunderbolt drives with a maximum of 1TB hard drive capacity.

ruggedlacie.jpg
LaCie announced that its award-winning Rugged USB 3.0 Thunderbolt(TM) Series hard drive is now available in a 2TB version. With double the storage of its predecessor, the new LaCie Rugged is the highest capacity bus-powered storage solution with Thunderbolt technology on the market. Plus, the 2TB model achieves speeds up to 127MB/s, a 15 percent increase from the previous version. With these speeds users can transfer 750 RAW photos or one HD movie in less than one minute.
Click to expand...
While the 1 TB launched at $250 last year, the unit is now available from the Apple Online Store for $200 and the new 2TB is available for $300 from LaCie's website.

Article Link: LaCie Adds 2TB Option to Its 'Rugged' Thunderbolt/USB 3.0 Portable Drives
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2013/11/21/lacie-adds-2tb-option-to-its-rugged-thunderboltusb-3-0-portable-drives/
RuggedTB_USB3_8_EN.jpg

What is the point of a single disk Thunderbolt enclosure for $300 when a USB3 one is much less and offers the same performance?
 
Do these RAID over Thunderbolt when you chain 2 or more together or something?

Or is it just about paying more to feel cool for using Thunderbolt?
 
So they charge $100 to swap a 1Tb 5400rpm 9.5mm 2.5" drive with one of the new 2Tb Samsung drives that just came out with those dimensions?

What a total waste. Might as well get any number of USB3 enclosures and wait for the bare drives to be available to the public. There's no advantage to using Thunderbolt at all with a HDD and it's a rip off at either price regardless of HDD capacity.
 
edk99 said:
Image
What is the point of a single disk Thunderbolt enclosure for $300 when a USB3 one is much less and offers the same performance?
Click to expand...

Some of the older macbook pro's don't have a USB 3 port, but they do have a thunderbolt port.
 
edk99 said:
Image
What is the point of a single disk Thunderbolt enclosure for $300 when a USB3 one is much less and offers the same performance?
Click to expand...
Not that I'm an expert on this, but this benchmark tests moving a few big sequential files from one place to another. A common work load is to move lots of little files. This stresses the I/O control mechansism, whatever that would be in this case. I had thought USB relies on the CPU, while Thunderbolt has its own controller, which would account for the cost difference but also provide better performance in the many small file case. But I could be wrong. :)
 
LaCie Adds 2TB Option to Its 'Rugged' Thunderbolt/USB 3.0 Portable Drives

This would be a take my damn money moment. But it's not 7200 rpm.
 
With a design like that, it better double as a life preserver.

sfdULDc.png
 
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Rugged? Really?

Spinning disks != rugged. Whatever genius thought of marketing a spinning disk as a rugged device MUST own stock in a data recovery company or two.
 
longofest said:
Is there a point to Thunderbolt connected to a single 5400 RPM drive?
Click to expand...

A 5400 RPM disk can transfer data a lot faster than USB 2 can handle it.
So the answer is: it's faster than the same disk attached to a USB 2 port.

There are some Macs with TB but not USB 3 and probably some more people who want to keep a USB 3 port free for other stuff. Admittedly, not a lot of people will want the TB version.
 
Ahhh….I have stopped laughing hard enough to where I can actually type.

This is so beyond moronic it is crazy. First, TB2 is backwards compatible with TB1, so there is nothing gained over the previous model of this drive because by putting a barely saturates FW800 5,400 RPM drive in this thing, it’s like putting an Eaton M90 Supercharger on a leaf blower. Maybe if you swapped the cutsie spinner out for a 1TB 840 EVO I could see the point, but this….?

I could *sort of* understand the TB1 version just for the sake of being able to use the USB3 and TB ports on any new MacBook Pro, but this is just stupid. Call me when they take this bulky enclosure and put a pair of fast PCIe SSD drives in it using RAID-0, then we will talk.
 
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Macshroomer said:
Ahhh….I have stopped laughing hard enough to where I can actually type.

This is so beyond moronic it is crazy. First, TB2 is backwards compatible with TB1, so there is nothing gained over the previous model of this drive because by putting a barely saturates FW800 5,400 RPM drive in this thing, it’s like putting a Eaton M90 Supercharger on a leaf blower. Maybe if you swapped the cutsie spinner out for a 1TB 840 EVO I could see the point, but this….?

I could *sort of* understand the TB1 version just for the sake of being able to use the USB3 and TB ports on any new MacBook Pro, but this is just stupid. Call me when they take this bulky enclosure and put a pair of fast PCIe SSD drives in it using RAID-0, then we will talk.
Click to expand...

You forgot to mention thats its overpriced and not worth it.
 
When I can get a $80 3TB USB 3.0 external drive on Black Friday (which would have the same performance as this), I can only sit back and be glad that I'm not a complete chump.
 
edk99 said:
Image
What is the point of a single disk Thunderbolt enclosure for $300 when a USB3 one is much less and offers the same performance?
Click to expand...

For one, I think it's more manageable to run a system from a TB drive. Not sure if that's even possible from USB.
 
I'm still waiting for someone to do a thunderbolt drive that uses smaller, cheaper, lower power drives, but more of them.

Four little 1.8" drives in a RAID array all chomping down data at once would be better than one big expensive drive.

It's like a four-headed hydra, vs a single fat man.
 
edk99 said:
What does that mean? How less manageable is a USB connection then a Thunderbolt connection?
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I agree. I've used old ATA drives I've accumulated over the years via a USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter to test out OS installs and software on a clone of my system drive so I don't have to jump in head first with updates that could break some of the older software I'm currently priced out of upgrading.
 
edk99 said:
Image
What is the point of a single disk Thunderbolt enclosure for $300 when a USB3 one is much less and offers the same performance?
Click to expand...

USB speeds are burst, not sustained. USB devices are not daisy-chainable. many apple products do not have USB 3 ports.
 
edk99 said:
What does that mean? How less manageable is a USB connection then a Thunderbolt connection?
Click to expand...

Remember that Thunderbolt (like FireWire) is bi-directional, which USB is not. The difference might not be noticeable if you're simply using the drive as a backup or are just transferring files. But if you use an external drive for video or audio production, as I do, the difference can be staggering.
 
jayducharme said:
Remember that Thunderbolt (like FireWire) is bi-directional, which USB is not. The difference might not be noticeable if you're simply using the drive as a backup or are just transferring files. But if you use an external drive for video or audio production, as I do, the difference can be staggering.
Click to expand...

So for encoding, it really might be worth it to score the cheaper TB1 version Rugged and replace the spinner with a good SDD like a 512 840 Pro. This topic is coming up more and more as we lose FW800 ports in favor of USB3 and TB2, aside from the wonky designed Seagate TB adapter, what is the best bus powered TB enclosure out there then?

It's really time third party vendors step up with plug and play solutions for SSD / TB users who want the small form factor, we are already at TB2 and it's like TB1 never even took off......

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mdelvecchio said:
USB speeds are burst, not sustained. USB devices are not daisy-chainable. many apple products do not have USB 3 ports.
Click to expand...

Ok, well bring on the TB devices that actually use fast drives instead of a stupid 5,400 RPM drive then....or at least point us in the direction of where we can get them. Lacie? Maybe as even with the SSD's in there they are not going much above 400MB/s peak, it's a SATA-III interface, that is the limit. Buffalo TB drive? No, it also has a spinner and from what I gather getting the case apart is akin to outright breaking it.

Any other bright ideas because this sub 100MB/s spinner drive in a TB case crap is for the birds, just about useless....

I moved a 202GB folder of D800 raw files from my 240GB OWC Envoy Pro EX SSD drive to my new 13" retina with the 1TB PCIe last week and it never dropped below 500MB/s, moved the whole darn folder in under 6.5 minutes....this was via USB3. Also, it took me all of ten minutes to install a USB3 via PCIe card in my MacPro. It does not hit max theoretical but it is about 3x faster than FW800...

By the looks of it, the only way we are going to truly see TB speeds out of these enclosures is if the fast PCIe drives that Apple has put in the new MacBook Pros become available to 3rd party companies who can use them to avoid SATA-III and come up with fast plug and play solutions like OWC's Envoy cases do.
 
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