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

[g4cube]

I dont need to, I'm an owned of one of those macs and mine has Firewire. I've never had the need to use Thunderbolt... and thats largely in part of the fact that my macbook has more thunderbolt ports than I have ever seen thunderbolt devices on store shelves: ZERO.

The Apple Store, online as well as brick-and-mortar, have plenty of Thunderbolt drives from several manufacturers.

So does Amazon, Best Buy, B&H, and many others. Sure, perhaps in your town there may not be any on the store shelves. But since you post here, you have Internet access, and a quick online search for Thunderbolt products will lead to many potential shopping hits.

There are many many products that never will show up on my local retailer's shelf. That doesn't mean there are no products available, nor are there no customers for those products. Many products sell very well and never appear on the retailers shelf at all.

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Looks like it has an SSD option, but that's only up to 256... Meh... Double meh.

El Gato now has a 512GB SSD with Thunderbolt and USB3.0 ports.
Only $899.95 USD
http://www.elgato.com/storage/thunderbolt-drive-512gb

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

El Gato now has a 512GB SSD with Thunderbolt and USB3.0 ports.
Only $899.95 USD
http://www.elgato.com/storage/thunderbolt-drive-512gb

Wow. "ONLY" $899.95. Holy flipping crap. You could buy a whole new Mac Mini for that plus throw two conventional drives in the thing and RAID them and at least get over half the same speed as that thing is rated for with FOUR TIMES the storage (INTERNAL!) for about the same price WITH the computer!

My Mini has 2TB Raided internally with conventional 5400 RPM drives and I get up to 270MB/sec write times. With 7200 RPM drives now available in 2.5", I have little doubt it could top out at 300MB/sec.

Is it really worth $600 more for 25% more speed? Heck, you could RAID two 3TB external drives.... I see Lacie makes a 6TB Thunderbolt RAID0 drive for $550 that does 330MB/sec. That's almost as fast as the SSD in question with 8x the storage for $350 less!

In short, SSDs still cost too much per MB. With media being the size it is today for HD movies, etc. and 4k-HD only going to be increasing that, it makes no sense for that sort of thing. One had better be doing video editing or some other high intensity use to justify those costs. Just playing a game of Call of Duty Ghost Ops doesn't cut it. Now some of these hybrid drives out there now might be reasonable for daily desktop use with bigger storage for media all in one enclosure, but until I see 3TB SSDs for under $300, they won't be of much use to me at all.

 

[g4cube]

Here is a review of the El Gato 512GB SSD drive:

http://9to5mac.com/2013/11/26/mini-review-elgato-thunderbolt-drive-512gb-external-ssd/

 

[Rossatron]

well, i would't say no to a thunderbolt HDD with that amount of space, but for me, the design is too ugly to be portable, and the price is way too high. if they'd sell it for $200 then i'm in.

yeah, USB3 is probably good for my needs (backup, streaming video) but then i don't have that thunderbolt-coolness to brag about

 

[cube]

Which ones are those?

Some older MBA.