LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 2
Now with an SSD upgrade
This drive pairs a Thunderbolt 2 connection with a 3.5-inch hard disk that can’t come close to using all of that interface’s 20Gbps bandwidth. However, the drive has two such ports, so you can daisychain other devices or a 4K display.
The disk’s sequential transfer rates are good enough, peaking at 223MB/sec and 227.2MB/sec, and averaging 186.9MB/sec and 178.7MB/sec when reading and writing, respectively. But, like any single hard disk, transfer rates are lower for the random transfer of small amounts of data.
However, LaCie offers an optional SSD upgrade, which you install as well as the 6TB drive. You buy it separately and it replaces the whole back panel with one that adds 128GB of flash storage.
LaCie refers to the upgraded d2 as a hybrid drive, but it doesn’t operate like one: the SSD isn’t used to cache used files from the combined storage. You get two volumes and manually pick what’s stored where.
LaCie says the SSD can read data at up to 1150MB/sec. We measured its peak transfer rate as 1170.2MB/ sec when reading sequentially, and its mean rate as 850.8MB/sec – 206.6MB/sec quicker than the 2014 MacBook Pro. When writing data sequentially, the SSD peaked at 926.4MB/sec, averaging 477.5MB/sec. It also held up well when randomly reading and writing small amounts of data.
As a plain hard drive, the d2 performs well enough but doesn’t warrant the price tag. The SSD’s speed pushes the bundle’s score
to three. Alan Stonebridge
The basic 6TB d2 is a good drive, but pretty expensive. The SSD add-on is very fast, but clunky and not cheap.