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Joined: 11 May 2006
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 Posted: Sat Feb 25, 2012 9:00 am Post subject: LaCie 2big Thunderbolt Series Review |
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We've been covering Thunderbolt storage ever since the first Promise Pegasus hit our labs last summer. Since then we've noticed a common theme: Thunderbolt storage is very expensive. Prices haven't come down much at all, although LaCie has helped fill in the gaps left by Promise's $1000 and up Pegasus line. I honestly wouldn't expect prices on Thunderbolt storage to drop until the second half of the year when cheaper Thunderbolt controllers (Cactus Ridge) are available. Ivy Bridge is supposed to bring Thunderbolt to PCs, which should obviously broaden the install base and hopefully push vendors to come out with more affordable solutions.</p>
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Thunderbolt is extremely important, particularly to the notebook-as-a-desktop usage model. Although SSDs have given notebook users desktop-like internal storage, external storage has often been painfully slow. The move to USB 3.0 helped address this, but thus far Apple hasn't adopted USB 3.0 in its machines. I suspect Apple will deliver USB 3.0 when it moves to Ivy Bridge in the coming months, but until then your options are limited if you've got a Mac. The fastest USB 2.0 devices are only good for around 40MB/s and FireWire 800 can deliver about twice that. If you need high speed external storage on a modern (2011+) Mac, your best option is Thunderbolt.</p>
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Thunderbolt's peak performance is very good. In our review of the Promise Pegasus R6 we measured 8Gbps of sustained data transfers from a four disk SSD array while driving a 27-inch panel, all over a single Thunderbolt cable.When it comes to storage, there's significant headroom in the interface. I don't believe Thunderbolt is quite fast enough to interface with a good high-end GPU, but it looks like we'll have to wait until at least 2014 to see that change.</p>
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LaCie's first foray into the Thunderbolt storage space came with the Little Big Disk. A hefty aluminum enclosure with two 2.5" hard drives (or SSDs) in a software RAID-0, the Little Big Disk hit price points as low as $399. If you need capacity however, you were left with Promise as your only option. Until now.</p>
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Read on for our review of LaCie's 2big Thunderbolt series drive.</p>
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Source: AnandTech
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