There is slight difference in price between 550 MB/s, SATA III SSDs and PCIe SSDs that offer 1.4 GB/s or 3.1 GB/s as the built-in ones from Apple do. Plus a TB enclosure (needed to go beyond SATA III speeds) adds additional costs as well.
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LaCie Introduces 'World's Fastest Desktop Drive' With Thunderbolt 3
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But why spend that kind of money on an external solution when you can spend about half to bump the internal storage to 2TB.
Maybe you want a 13" MBP (which tops out a 1 TB). Or you already are at 2 TB internal and need (want) even more space at high speed.
Don't bash the thunderbolt pci-e SSD from lacie too much because most of Lacie's SSD based drives over the past 3 years have utilized Samsung flash storage. These are the 2 major SSD units they currently sell along with the actual drive inside:
-Lacie Rugged Thunderbolt 500GB SSD - Samsung 850 EVO drive
-Lacie Rugged Thunderbolt 1TB SSD - Samsung 850 Pro drive
Then there was the Black 1TB Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2 that was released in early 2014 to compliment the new Mac Pro's. It was nothing like the crap original Lacie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt units that had SATA2 spinning drives and an extremely loud fan. It was totally redesigned and was silent because it had 1 small fan that no one would ever hear and was almost entirely thermally cooled by the aluminum enclosure. When it was released in 2014 it utilized 2 top of the line Samsung XP941 PCIe SSD'S which were basically the same flash Apple was using in the MacBook Pro's at the time. I actually personally own this drive and I still consistently get speeds of around 1300MB/s read and 1000MB/s write. It is 2.5 years old and I've never had an issue. I had a late 2013 MacBook Pro and Mac Pro and the cost of storage was largely in line with Apple's (not something to brag about, but at the time, there were hardly any devices that used pci-e flash.
However, I due agree that Lacie's spinning drive based units have become very unreliable. Not only do they frequently have drive failures, but the power supplies they use seem to play a big role in their reliability. Years ago they were top of the line units and extremely dependable, but I wouldn't trust my data to their HDD based units today.
-Lacie Rugged Thunderbolt 500GB SSD - Samsung 850 EVO drive
-Lacie Rugged Thunderbolt 1TB SSD - Samsung 850 Pro drive
Then there was the Black 1TB Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2 that was released in early 2014 to compliment the new Mac Pro's. It was nothing like the crap original Lacie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt units that had SATA2 spinning drives and an extremely loud fan. It was totally redesigned and was silent because it had 1 small fan that no one would ever hear and was almost entirely thermally cooled by the aluminum enclosure. When it was released in 2014 it utilized 2 top of the line Samsung XP941 PCIe SSD'S which were basically the same flash Apple was using in the MacBook Pro's at the time. I actually personally own this drive and I still consistently get speeds of around 1300MB/s read and 1000MB/s write. It is 2.5 years old and I've never had an issue. I had a late 2013 MacBook Pro and Mac Pro and the cost of storage was largely in line with Apple's (not something to brag about, but at the time, there were hardly any devices that used pci-e flash.
However, I due agree that Lacie's spinning drive based units have become very unreliable. Not only do they frequently have drive failures, but the power supplies they use seem to play a big role in their reliability. Years ago they were top of the line units and extremely dependable, but I wouldn't trust my data to their HDD based units today.
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I get that there'll be some extreme cases, but it just feels like at that price they'll only sell a dozen.
This is tech porn for me, almost .. wow, amazing speeds, lovely design, great pric.. nvm, i can't afford that.
(but i really want it)
(but i really want it)
I've got a rugged lacie 500gb that i use for 'unique offline offsite backup', and it has been working fine since.
I do test it before doing the weekly update, just because it's the source, and there's a clone of it at my place, but that's it.
This data gone, I am in trouble. It has been fine so far.
how do we know that it is the 950 and not the 960 range? Are you talking about 2015 models or are you talking about the 2016s just announced? I know Samsung only makes the 2TB drive for the 960 Pro line so I was guessing that is what will be in the models announced on Thursday.
I'm talking about the crMBP models (classic retina MacBook Pro). Anyway, according to that OWC teardown, the 2016 model has a complete different form factor.
You were replying to me? I meant if TB3 drive can connect at all to a usb-c-only computer, such as Macbook 12".
I will never forget the day (it was around two years ago) when my LaCie RAID completely corrupted what was my entire digital life. 2x 2TB in RAID 1 mode (= one drive, mirrored).
Both drives suddenly turned unreadable.
I cried. Seriously.
It was exactly what the setup was supposed to prevent.
Both drives suddenly turned unreadable.
I cried. Seriously.
It was exactly what the setup was supposed to prevent.
Agreed. Every LaCie drive I have owned (I think I have owned three or four) has failed. Never again will I trust them with my data, especially for professional projects at that!
Why is it so slow if it has striped PCI SSDs? I've got two Samsung SM951s in a server, striped with the Linux software RAID, and I'm seeing 4GiB/s throughput for write, a bit higher for read. Would be even faster if I used newer ones.
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LaCie has been bad for me too, both their hardware and the infamous Seagate HDDs they use. But I don't trust any kind of consumer-level hardware RAID for redundancy anymore. I've been burned by other brands' RAID enclosures too. Software RAID seems better supported.
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If you want external instead of internal and PCI speed instead of SATA speed.
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Internal is NVMe PCIe. It'll get the same speeds. But as someone had previously posted. It's if you need capacity in addition to the 2TB included.
Lacie uses 3rd party drives like every storage company. Which drives experienced a higher than normal failure rate?
You do know the deep historic entanglement between LaCie, Seagate and Quantum?
LaCie is nothing more than a premium casing subsidiary of a Seagate.
Too bad, I'd rather have the opposite, beautiful designed harddrives in a rubbish casing.
And I actually think the cost of the 2TB isn't *that* bad for what it is.
$6400 is a lot, but for 120TB. 1-2-0!
Well, the $6400 contains twelve 10 TB hard drives, and those cost over $500 each. The controller and drive enclosure aren't cheap either.
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Or, more specifically, LaCie is owned by Seagate, so uses Seagate drives - so OldSchoolMacGuy is saying Seagate drives are failure prone.
I had tons of problems with Quantum drives back in the day; but Seagate drives have been very reliable for me for a few years now. Including a couple LaCie-supplied ones.