With 6TB of storage and fast Thunderbolt read and write speeds, the LaCie 2Big Thunderbolt Series drive offers fast speeds for backup or video processing. Macworld Lab testing by James Galbraith Macworld’s buying advice We then used AJA System Test with the Video Frame Size set to 1920 by 1080 10-bit RGB and a file size of 2GB. We did the same with a 10.77GB folder of 7,420 smaller files.
We timed the copy of a 10.77GB Zip file to the external drive and then timed copying the file back to the internal. Visit us, explore, and be inspired by premium external hard drives, SSDs, and RAID solutions that give you field-proven reliability and bold performance.
We connected each drive to a 2011 17-inch 2.4GHz Core i7 MacBook Pro running OS X 10.7.2 with 4GB of RAM and an internal 250GB SSD. The Little Big Disk SSD was 58 percent faster at the read test than the 2big, but the 2big was about 20 percent faster in the write test than the Little Big Disk SSD.Īll scores in MB per second. Using AJA’s System Test, we see bigger performance differences between the drives, with the six-drive Pegasus coming in 76 percent faster the the write test and 73 percent faster then the 2big int he read test. When comparing the Thunderbolt devices we’ve tested, the results from the 2GB File test and 2GB Folder test were flat, with the slowest device being the hard drive version of the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt series (pointing to the internal SSD as a bottleneck in those tests). Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series( ) that we’ve tested, and we’ve also looked at the Promise
NOTE: If you do not launch LaCie Setup Assistant or if you quit LaCie Setup Assistant after the formatting has begun, your drive will not be ready to use and will require manual formatting. Mac users: Double-click the LaCie Setup Assistant icon on your desktop.
Now click on Disk Management on the left hand side. Windows users: Double-click the LaCie drive icon in My Computer. Document the disk number provided in this window (Disk 1, Disk 2, etc). Actually using the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series requires the purchase of an Apple Thunderbolt cable. Right click on your external drive listed under Disk Drives. LaCie also has a hard drive version of the The drives can be configured as mirrored or striped arrays by using OS X’s Disk Utility. Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series SSD ( ) the SSD-based LaCie was a bit faster than the 2big in the read tests. The 2big’s write speeds were a touch faster than another Thunderbolt drive from LaCie, the When copying the 10.6GB file and 10.7GB folder back to internal we saw read speeds of 182.8MBps and 148.6MBps, respectively.
When copying a 10.7GB folder with 7427 files, we saw a write speed of 191.7MB per second. When copying a 10.7GB file from the internal SSD to the 2big, we saw write times of 217.5MB per second. The AJA System Test showed more of a difference between the two, with the Pegasus reaching 707.6MBps on the write test and 532.0MBps on the read test.To see how fast the Thunderbolt 2Big is, we ran a series of tests with it attached to a 17-inch 2.4GHz Core i7 MacBook Pro with an internal 250GB SSD and 4GB of RAM. That performance gap increased to 15 percent on the folder read test, 22 percent on the file read and 27 percent faster than the LaCie on the folder write test. When compared to the Pegasus R6 12TB RAID array, the LaCie definitely held its own on the file and folder transfer tests, especially the 2GB file read which the Pegasus was just 6 percent faster than the LaCie. When reading a 2GB file, the Little Big Disk sped along at 167.0MBps, compared to 74.5MBps for the Avastor. Whereas the Avastor topped out at about 75.0MBps throughput, the Little Big Disk topped 207MBps in the AJA System read test and 190.0MBps in AJA System write test. That said, the LaCie drive is fast-at least twice as fast in most tests than a similar RAID array that we tested, theĪvastor XMR Mobile RAID Drive ( ), which was tested using FireWire 800. If the drive requires external power, why not use a design that uses 3.5-inch drives that are generally faster and less expensive than the 2.5-inch drives that are used?
With the two Thunderbolt ports, however, you can daisy chain more Thunderbolt devices, or an Apple Cinema Display with Mini DisplayPort.Īnd while the LaCie drive is that its meant to be portable, it requires external power. Sure, Apple sells a lot of Macs with Thunderbolt ports onboard, but these drives would be much more useful with an assortment of connectors. As with the other Thunderbolt drive we’ve tested (the Pegasus R6), the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series of drives has only one connection type, a pair of Thunderbolt ports. The Plugable Thunderbolt 3 NVMe External SSD is a solid state drive that offers one terabyte or two terabytes of external storage for those who like to create on the go.