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LaCie Thunderbolt-Enabled Little Big Disk Available from Apple

mhuk01 said:
did anyone get a screenshot of the applestore page? the link is now dead and it doesn't seem to be listed on the store anymore, only the ssd models.
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The Lacie site has a link to the Apple store which now gives a dead page.

This must be because they are sold out. People will line up to get bargains like this. At prices like this i'm sure they will fly off the shelves.

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scarred said:
Well, this makes the 400 dollar version look good. :>

If I need portable storage like this, I'll spend $1499 on a new Macbook Pro and leave the Air at home.

So disappointed with this... First time I've felt a bit sad for buying my Macbook Air.
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Yes clever isn't it. Now all of a sudden $400 looks cheap.

Boy, i'm in trouble :eek:
 
ChrisA said:
No, your numbers are wrong. You confuse the interface speed with the mechanical speed of the drive. SATA drives can transfer data between the drive's cache and the computer at the SATA cable speed of 300Mb/s but the magnetic disk platter is almost 10X slower than that

Yes, FW800 maxes out at 65MB/s. because that is the speed of two magnetic disk platters. The bottle neck with FW800 is not the cable. So with a 10X faster cable we will still see 65MB/s

The real advantage of this TB disk drive is that it will daisy chain with other TB devices and reduce the total number of cables and you get "bragging rights"
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I agree with you, but for less $, you can have FW800 HDD that you can connect 4-5 of them in series.

Personally, I dont see why spending that money for a TB HDD for not much faster.

I will probably stick with my 4-5 FW800 HDD connected together. Their speed is fast enough for me
 
Mike Oxard said:
Less platters/higher density perhaps??
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Nah, it'll be a typo. Areal density is important, but it's not a 1:1 linear scale of speed. Number of platters doesn't matter for speed at all.

FW800 has a fair amount of non-data traffic which makes full speed impossible. Yes, modern drives and setups are probably a bit faster than the 65MB/s I quoted - but even in recent tests Barefeats barely manages to get past 80MB/s:



http://www.barefeats.com/tbolt01.html
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From the BareFeats link you showed us, it looks like (at least on that machine), it peaks at about 82 MB/s.

Considering I get ~55 MB/s (non-burst) read speeds on my 8 year old 120 GB Seagate in this computer, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say yeah.. you underestimeated magnetic storage's speed capabilities.

I have an external eSATA 5400 RPM 1 TB HDD, and it gets ~118 MB/s sustained unbuffered read speeds. 7200 RPM drives will hit upwards of 130 MB/s, and the latest, 4 TB drives are capable of ~150 MB/s. The 600 GB Velociraptor hits nearly 160 MB/s... and forget about the 15K.7 600 GB Cheetah.

You seem to be confusing FW800 bandwidth limits with hard drive speed.

The important point is however that a single mechanical hard drive has been able to saturate a FW800 connection for a number of years.
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FW800 limits were hit a long time ago.. around 2005 for fast entry-level enthusiast drives (i.e. the 74 GB Raptor). And if you want two drives on the chain, double the amount of necessary peak bandwidth requirements.

TBolt removes that limitation, and is a very worthwhile improvement (more so for multiple drives)
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I just wish they'd have FW3200 already. I imagine it'd be cheaper, and fast enough for 99.5% of users.
 
MacSince1990 said:
Considering I get ~55 MB/s (non-burst) read speeds on my 8 year old 120 GB Seagate in this computer, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say yeah.. you underestimeated magnetic storage's speed capabilities.
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Nope - you should reread what I said. It's FW800 I'm unimpressed with, not magnetic storage's speed capabilities.

I'm happy that Barefeats are now getting 82MB/s out of it. A few years back when I finally gave up on FW800 for my storage I was getting well over 100MB/s for a directly attached drive, but never more than 65MB/s over FW800. That's the fastest I've seen in my personal experience, using mechanical drives that were way faster than the FW800 interface.

I have an external eSATA 5400 RPM 1 TB HDD, and it gets ~118 MB/s sustained unbuffered read speeds. 7200 RPM drives will hit upwards of 130 MB/s, and the latest, 4 TB drives are capable of ~150 MB/s. The 600 GB Velociraptor hits nearly 160 MB/s... and forget about the 15K.7 600 GB Cheetah.
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I stopped relying on externals and 3 1/2 years ago got a MacPro. I've got a mix of slower 'green' and faster drives. I've owned both of the last generations of Velociraptor... although I do think that the smaller form factor of the current 600GB trades off some potential throughput for lower latency. The large capacity 2TB Caviar Black is very quick - particularly if you partition your data to use the outer tracks.

You seem to be confusing FW800 bandwidth limits with hard drive speed.
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Really, no. I'm well aware of the speed of my drives.

I just wish they'd have FW3200 already. I imagine it'd be cheaper, and fast enough for 99.5% of users.
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Firewire died the moment Apple stopped including it on all their machines. Peripheral manufacturers saw that Apple was loosing interest and started migrating off.
 
firestarter said:
Firewire died the moment Apple stopped including it on all their machines. Peripheral manufacturers saw that Apple was loosing interest and started migrating off.
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Firewire is on all but the ultraportable. With Thunderbolt display, even MacBook Air can connect to firewire drives once again.

Thunderbolt are on all machines.
 
Consultant said:
Firewire is on all but the ultraportable. With Thunderbolt display, even MacBook Air can connect to firewire drives once again.
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Well, Apple first dropped firewire from the MacBook line three years ago - before the MBA came along.

It's been particularly noticeable to see audio interface manufacturers get out of the Firewire-only market and into dual FW/USB interfaces, or even USB only (like the Apogee duel).

It's great that TB brings FW compatibility back, but I really think that the FW boat has sailed...
 
@firestarter,
Actually, Apple is saying that firewire is a pro feature. Those only interested in buying the low end products are not the customer of firewire devices anyway.

Firewire port is also too thick for MacBook Air.

However Apple added support to all Macs with Thunderbolt.
 
Consultant said:
@firestarter,
Actually, Apple is saying that firewire is a pro feature. Those only interested in buying the low end products are not the customer of firewire devices anyway.

Firewire port is also too thick for MacBook Air.

However Apple added support to all Macs with Thunderbolt.
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Well, we'll see. We now have a 'Firewire sandwich' with USB being low end and Thunderbolt being high end. You're right, having added Thunderbolt, Firewire is no longer Apple's problem - a user can add that functionality back to a machine even if they only have a Thunderbolt port. How soon before they remove it from more machines?

I'm not sure I agree with your characterisation of Pro/Non Pro though. Even pros buy machines like the MBA, to give them portability. It's great to have peripherals that are compatible with all your machines - and I think that's why there's been a migration to USB going on.

It'll be interesting to see what happens if Apple implements USB3 at some point. Most of the reason for FW to remain goes out of the window at that point.
 
Sneakz said:
FW800 maxes out at 100MB/s for real world transfer rates of just short of 90MB/s. 65 is not even close.
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Wow I want to live in your real world. I can count on one thumb how many times I've gotten over 65-75MB/s on FW800, and our company deals with sometimes dozens of drives/data transfers per day. Not once has it exceeded 100MB/s (nor should it. 800Mbps is 100MB/s). I'm sure you've seen 65 or less as well, as everyone gets a bad/dying drive sometime.
 
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Lacie is now advertising it on their website and for those that thought you couldn't daisy chain a display off the disk check this out from their website :

LBD_TB_11.jpg
 
tigres said:
I don't get it.

Apple is catering less to the pro's, yet insist on a technology that is utter expensive for cost of entry.

Might be worth it for some, but TB to me is far away until I see some cost to time benefit of >$400 for my time to transfer. Heck, I'm not James Bond on a train ready to explode.

Not saying that many don't appreciate it, the speeds are mindblowing; but really $1k to enter on the pegasus line, and now Lacie with this- plus the $50 cable to boot. I just bought a FW lacie 2TB for 169 on clearance.

IDK, are a lot of users biting on this?
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yeah it's a tad bit rediculus. Apple holds off on USB 3.0, probably holding off on 4G for iPhone. Yet they don't mind implementing Thunderbolt very early off. I don't understand why they wanted a year of exclusive rights with intel to begin with. If everyone was allowed to adopt the platform earlier, we would see many more developers making thunderbolt compatible devices.

Till then we might as well just wait. The only plus side is that current macs with thunderbolt get some future proof, having already a Thunderbolt port. However, that precious room may have been used for battery space and/or a better GPU/CPU which would have made for a better computer and overall better future proof.
 
LaCie Thunderbolt-Enabled Little Big Disk Available from Apple

BTW THE NON SSD DRIVES in this product are 5400 RPM drives and not the usual 7200 RPM, what a STUPID MOVE by Lacie!!!!! Need I say a lack of intelligence by Lacie, who wants slow notebook drives.... See Lacie website for this posted info on those drives.
 
The 1TB & 2TB Thunderbolt Little Big Disk are now gone from Apple's store. No way to order them. I had one on order, canceled it and now it's not possible to find the device on Apple's store web site any more.
 
Prynce said:
BTW THE NON SSD DRIVES in this product are 5400 RPM drives and not the usual 7200 RPM, what a STUPID MOVE by Lacie!!!!! Need I say a lack of intelligence by Lacie, who wants slow notebook drives.... See Lacie website for this posted info on those drives.
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LaCie is smart enough. They make prettily designed peripherals for hipsters. Using slower drives will reduce production costs nicely.
 
Prynce said:
BTW THE NON SSD DRIVES in this product are 5400 RPM drives and not the usual 7200 RPM, what a STUPID MOVE by Lacie!!!!! Need I say a lack of intelligence by Lacie, who wants slow notebook drives.... See Lacie website for this posted info on those drives.
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I just saw this too. That's just horrible.

Thunderbolt + 5400 RPM?

What?
 
this is a ripoff...but it's Lacie, so not entirely unexpected.

say the 500 GB drives are $50 each. a good enclosure is, say, $150 (I think that's a bit generous, but whatever). so you're paying another $150 for two SATA to TB connections? this isn't a hardware RAID, so there is no RAID card and there's no restrictions on hard drives. and it doesn't even come with a cable? :confused:

Lacie's website says the 1TB (2x500GB) model uses 7200 RPM drives, the 2TB (2x1TB) uses 5400.
 
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dilgit said:
The 1TB & 2TB Thunderbolt Little Big Disk are now gone from Apple's store. No way to order them. I had one on order, canceled it and now it's not possible to find the device on Apple's store web site any more.
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They are back up now.
 
I don't know why many bash Lacie's costs. I think they make great products, good value, and I have personally had great service by them. I own 5 drives (all different configs), and have had minimal issues tbh; them being sexy looking also helps.

At any rate, I think that the expensive factor is the TB, and nothing more.
Oh, yes it is crazy expensive- but I don't see anything cheap yet (how long has it been out almost a year?) or anything coming in the distant future to suggest a deep discounted price.

I guess I won't be owning that Ferrari for a few more years. :(
 
I am wondering if it's possible to buy the HDD version and swap in my own SSDs. It also appears that the drive just uses OS X software RAID (based on looking through the online manual), so it might even be possible to use the thing as a simple (and expensive) enclosure for two separate disks/SSDs.
 
I have a hard time understanding this products... What a waste of money.

The promise RAID5 enclosure offers, in the same price range, speed WITH some amount of security.

RAID stripped drives always seemed like a bad idea to me (even more so after I lost a bunch of data once).
 
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