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Lacie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2

A

ApplesAOranges

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 7, 2011
335
3
Any rumors when this is going to be released? It says Q1 on their website, but still nothing.

I find that this hard drive is the only one with truly fast read/writes. There´s not so much good SSD Thunderbolt solutions out there for the new Mac Pro.
 
It's out!

Pricing was released, I believe over the weekend and just received an notification email this morning that it's available!!
 
Helps if you post links and actually mention the pricing...

• UK: £1059 http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/product.htm?id=10621
(TBolt v1 £800: http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/product.htm?id=10549 .)

• US: $1299. http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?id=10621
• Euro: €1279 (FR) / €1249 (DE). http://www.lacie.com/fr/products/product.htm?id=10621 / http://www.lacie.com/de/products/product.htm?id=10621


In UK£, given the 1TB Tbolt 1 version is only £800 vs. the £1059 TBolt 2 one, 'cheap' it isn't (33% more expensive, to be precise) – but it's for pro's not consumers, so they'll likely pay that if they need one. Although it does have "3-Year Limited Warranty Included", if that's worth anything to you.

EDIT: US price added.
 
Last edited:
As an aside, the G-Tech G-Drive units with TB and USB3 at either 3TB or 4TB are available as well.
 
wildmac said:
As an aside, the G-Tech G-Drive units with TB and USB3 at either 3TB or 4TB are available as well.
Click to expand...

Thunderbolt 1 for the G-Tech.

The new Little Big Disk is Thunderbolt 2 and a screamer according to the recent reviews.
 
This reply was from LaCie's Facebook page a while back:

"LaCie Hi Robert. We have not determined a final price yet. The product will ship this quarter and we will let our fans know the price as soon as it is available. As a comparison the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt first gen. was $999. The new one will be a little more.
January 9 at 4:11pm"

Evidently "a little more" sounds better to LaCie than 30%.
 
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g4cube said:
Thunderbolt 1 for the G-Tech.

The new Little Big Disk is Thunderbolt 2 and a screamer according to the recent reviews.
Click to expand...

However.. assuming you are not dealing with a RAID, are you really going to pay for a TB2 device that has a HDD drive in it?
 
Er ... sorry a 1TB 840 EVO SSD from Samsung is €450 ( £400 - ish )

So the box/psu and 2 x TB sockets on a small controller board is another £649 ???

I don't buy it .... and I wont be !

M.
 
Marty62 said:
Er ... sorry a 1TB 840 EVO SSD from Samsung is €450 ( £400 - ish )

So the box/psu and 2 x TB sockets on a small controller board is another £649 ???

I don't buy it .... and I wont be !

M.
Click to expand...

These aren't SATA based SSDs. Samsung Evo is a lot slower than this, so your comparison is odd.

ETA:
If you can find 1 TB of PCIe-based SSD storage for €450, then let me know where please
 
Last edited:
Marty62 said:
My Bad - I didn't know it was PCI-e based... Lacie have gone up in the world
since I last used them regularly = I had three 400/800/ESata drives fail !!

M.
Click to expand...

Initial benchmarks show that it is quite an impressive performer. I am tempted, but it means having to deal with yet more cables and a power adaptor.
 
Looks good but at that price I might as well get a pegasus 2. My gtech Thunderbolt drives are just fine at 4 TB for under $400 I'm happy.
 
wildmac said:
However.. assuming you are not dealing with a RAID, are you really going to pay for a TB2 device that has a HDD drive in it?
Click to expand...

According to LaCie's website, and Anandtech's review in January when first announced, this drive has 2 512GB PCIe SSD devices inside that are striped using Apple Disk Utility. In RAID-0, performance is over 1GB/sec sustained, and in some benchmarks delivers up to 1.3GB/sec. Thunderbolt2, too, and no provision for placing any HDD inside. PCIe devices are quite rare in the normal reseller channels.

From the photos and videos at LaCie's website, looks like there was some special consideration for cooling, too.

As others have noted PCIe SSD devices are found in the nMP and the rMBP. SATA and mSATA devices cannot deliver this kind of performance unless using 4 or more in a Thunderbolt2 chassis. The devices inside the nMP are faster than the ones inside the rMP, so may be 4-lane PCIe instead of 2-lane PCIe. Also, though similar in shape, the Apple keying for the PCIe devices is different from the M.2/NGFF standard, making the Apple devices proprietary to Apple. There are other threads here on Macrumors.com that have more details about this form factor.

Sooo...bottom line, $1299 US is the price for this kind of performance today.
 
Can this drive be used as a bootcamp drive for Windows on the nMP? I.e. is it possible to connect via TB2 and use the LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt™ 2 as a bootcamp partition?
 
I am not so sure... The Lacie description says it is NOT hardware Raid, but rather a software one, which would indicate that the Raid0 is only in OSX, and thus will not work in Windows. Hence it will not work as a bootcamp drive for a Windows boot.

However, if anyone has other information or experience I really would like to know. I am looking for a TB2 solution for my nMP, one which I can use for bootcamp.
 
Killerbob said:
I am not so sure... The Lacie description says it is NOT hardware Raid, but rather a software one, which would indicate that the Raid0 is only in OSX, and thus will not work in Windows. Hence it will not work as a bootcamp drive for a Windows boot.

However, if anyone has other information or experience I really would like to know. I am looking for a TB2 solution for my nMP, one which I can use for bootcamp.
Click to expand...

Correct. You would have to break the software RAID, and use one of the 2 PCIe 512GB SSDs inside for your Bootcamp install.

Recall that there are 2x512GB PCIe SSDs inside that LaCie uses Apple Disk Utility to stripe into a RAID-0 volume. Disk Utility can be used to format each drive into a separate volume. To Windows, then, drive would appear as two separate devices. They should appear as devices using the AHCI driver.
 
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