LaCie 12Big
LACIE 2BIG/6BIG/12BIG THUNDERBOLT 3
Photographers don’t need a lesson in the importance of data storage. Data is precious, whether it’s your own irreplaceable family photos or the unrepeatable images from a business client’s wedding. THE CLASSIC CRITERIA FOR
data storage have been capacity and reliability — we want space for now and for the foreseeable future, and automatic back-up, not a manual method that can be neglected, but complete protection against hard-drive failure or malfunction. We need it setand-forget, and we need to trust it.
But as standards have progressed and file sizes have risen, speed has also become ever more important – speed of writing when we’re dumping the contents from a card of 4K video; speed of reading when we’re searching and playing back. And for real-time viewing of final content – videos and movies in particular – we need the ability to serve that data to the point of consumption without any of the constrictions that lead to buffering.
In the age of videography, indeed, speed has become crucial for more than recall; it is part of the creation process itself. Editing video – especially 4K and now moving on to an 8K world – requires the ability to play multiple video streams simultaneously from potentially enormous files. Best results are obtained by shunting all files for a project onto the computer hard drive ready for editing, but that’s increasingly impractical and slow with the everlarger files generated with 4K video. Yet what external hard drive interface is fast enough to deliver reliable speeds through an external connection?
Thunderbolt 3
The answer here may be Thunderbolt 3, which not only offers advantages in sheer speed, but was designed from the ground up by Intel and Apple to combine DisplayPort and PCI Express into a single connection, able to chain both data storage and high-res displays without loss of data throughput.
While USB is not designed for highperformance graphics input-output, Thunderbolt is a low-latency and highbandwidth interface, the integration of PCI Express allowing connectivity between computer, external graphics card units, displays and storage in a sequence or ring arrangement. And while USB initially looked to be offering advantages in universality over the earlier versions of Thunderbolt, the latest Thunderbolt 3 has incorporated USB 3.1 and uses the USB-C connector. Any Thunderbolt 3 port works as a USB-C port, although it’s important to remember that this isn’t true the other way around – USB-C equipment doesn’t deliver the advantages of Thunderbolt 3.
LaCie Goes Big
LaCie’s Thunderbolt 3 solutions come in two-drive, six-drive and 12-drive sizes. Even the largest of these is impressively compact in terms of its footprint. They’re built vertically so take up less desk space than, say, a MacBook Air. They use aluminium enclosures which are able to dissipate heat better than plastic, and the larger units have
Uncompressed HD 10-bit and 12-bit video previewing? No problem. RAW cinema-level footage to back-up? It’ll suck it in.
thermo-regulated fans, though even these have built-in redundancy so that one fan failure won’t put the LaCie
12big or 6big out of operation.
The 2big designs are available in two varieties, which might be broadly considered Mac and PC alternatives.
The Thunderbolt 3 version is a ‘Dock’ design which has a selection of helpful ports and card slots, with photographers benefiting from front CF and SD card slots which allow direct and rapid transfer of files from DSLR, GoPro or drone. Or there’s the 2big
RAID which keeps things simple with design, and offers USB-C without the significant Thunderbolt 3 advantages.
While USB-C can be the easier choice for Windows and for keeping ancillary costs such as cables down, if you’re aiming to handle high-definition video speeds, go with the more professional solution of Thunderbolt 3. Don’t, however, be overly duped by theoretical maximum speeds. USB-C/3.1 standards may theoretically deliver the 10.0 Gbps of the original Thunderbolt 1 standard, while Thunderbolt 3 can theoretically handle 40 Gbps over short cable runs. Both designs of
2RAID quote 440 MB/ second, even then noting that “…actual data rates may vary”.
The stacked 12big
Thunderbolt 3 is the ultimate in the range: 12 bays, giving 96 TB of storage if loaded with Seagate’s IronWolf 8.0 TB enterprisegrade hard drives, but with space for up to a massive 168 TB if 14.0 TB drives are used. Indeed, with Thunderbolt’s inherent chaining design, Thunderbolt 3 lets you daisy-chain up to six devices to a computer through a single cable, so you could connect six LaCie 12bigs together – one petabyte of storage.
For video fiends, the highlight may be the speeds available, LaCie claiming to have squeezed out transfer rates up to 2600 MB/second from those 7200 rpm IronWolf drives. Uncompressed HD 10-bit and 12-bit video previewing? No problem. RAW cinema-level footage to back-up? It’ll suck it in. And for that video editing scenario, Thunderbolt 3 lets you daisy-chain dual 4K displays to the LaCie 12big or 6big, even a 5K display. With the dual 4K solution, you could dedicate one display to previewing footage and the other to a timeline.
RAIDing it
Those IronWolf drives are specified for 24x7 reliability; they’re covered by a five-year warranty, and 2big includes Rescue Data Recovery Services lasting the length of that warranty, replacing your drive and recovering your files with one in-lab data recovery service at no additional cost.
But you don’t want to go through the recovery process. RAID (redundant array of independent disks) keeps your data automatically backed up on the other disks, though of course this uses up some of your capacity. The advantage of having so many drives in the 12big (or 6big) is that RAIDconfiguring your drives to back up each other is less wasteful of space.
On a two-drive 2big, RAID 1 makes the second drive into a copy of the first; you’re fully backed up automatically, but your storage capacity is halved.
But RAID 5 uses three or more disks, and the maths works out at a storage efficiency of 1 minus 1/n, where ‘n’ is the number of disks. So you basically lose the capacity of one of however many disks you start with for the backup process.
With three disks (the minimum for RAID 5), you’d lose a third of your total disk capacity. With 12 disks, then, you lose only a twelfth, or 8.3 percent. So from 96 TB, you’d come down to 88 TB. A luckier number, as well as safer.
Any single drive can fail with no loss of data. How would you know it has happened? There are indicator lights on the drive slots, but also LaCie’s RAID Manager program makes it easy not only to configure any ‘big’ product for data redundancy but to monitor the system’s health. If there’s trouble, you’ll get an email.
The Verdict
Thunderbolt 3 offers a professional level above USB 3.1 and USB-C, and LaCie’s ‘big’ range harnesses its abilities to the maximum, both for speed of operation and reliability of storage. It’s as bulletproof a localised storage solution as one can imagine, and for anyone working in the 4K video space on a Mac, it could revolutionise editing of multiple streams at once at speed, without the swearing. For more information visit www.lacie.com