“The 12big Thunderbolt 3 (TB3) is not for everyone, partly because not everyone can afford it,” Dong Ngo writes for CNET. “Starting at $6,399 for 48 terabytes of storage space [$5,999 at Amazon], going all the way to $13,700 for 120TB [$12,999 at Amazon], it’s one of the most, if not the most, expensive consumer-grade storage system on the market.”
“The 12big is gigantic, both in terms of capacity and physical size,” Ngo writes. “You’ll also need a recent computer equipped with a TB3 input to take advantage of its performance.”
“That said, the new storage device only suitable for professionals who does a lot of heavy editing work, like high definition movie editing. And for this target audience, it will do well,” Ngo writes. “If you find yourself in this demographic but need something with less storage space and lower price, the 6big Thunderbolt 3 [starting at $2,999 for 24TB at Amazon] is also an excellent alternative,” Ngo writes.
“The 12big is by far the fastest storage device I’ve seen. I tested it with a 2016 Macbook Pro and via a TB3 connection, in a RAID-5, it has the sustained real-world write speed of 1,161 megabyte per seconds, its read speed was even better at 1,371MB/s,” Ngo writes. “To put this in perspective, with this kind of speed, you can finish transferring a Blu-ray disc worth of data (25GB) in less than 20 seconds. ”
Much more in the full review here.
MacDailyNews Take: For those who can never have enough storage space or speed!
Isn’t TB3 being axed?
Not hardly. It’s just getting started.
Give it a year. It will get the Firewire treatment.
Every item from Lacie I ever owned failed at one point or another. That kind of experience has made be gun shy of any Lacie product since (especially an expensive one) when I could buy an Areca or one or two others that I would feel more confident of. I once had a gig in Oregon and they were right next door so I could walk over and give them something to fix. Happily I haven’t been using anything from them since.
BTW I just went over to take a look at all of Apple’s Mac offerings this morning and for the first time ever felt there was nothing there I would want to buy at this point in time and with plenty of money burning in my pocket. That the specs were completely out of date, for my purposes anyway. Why does Apple always feel at least a year (or more) late on updating? Depressing.
I gave up on all Lacie products years ago.
I have also experienced three LaCie drives failures. I’ll never buy another drive from them.
I own two different LaCie external hard drives and also an old 5-disc LaCie 5big NAS box. None of them have given me any trouble except the power brick on the 5big died, which was cheap and easy to replace.
YMMV. I think the quality of LaCie products is just as good as any other external driver maker overall. LaCie uses SeaGate Barracuda enterprise class drives with a 5 year warranty. What better reliability are you getting elsewhere at any price?
I used to happily pay a premium for LaCie products. The industrial design of their products isn’t as good as it once was, and I feel like the quality / reliability has gone down.
Having said that, this looks like a decent product — I just don’t know who has a Mac with Thunderbolt 3 to take advantage of it.
Drobo with 64TB is way cheaper. Lacie is too crazy expensive.
Drobo, expensive (why isn’t there an edit feature here?????) Is this the stone age?
Have to be careful with these devices! If the board goes bad, are you able to repair it? Or do you have to buy a whole other unit? Discovered this the hard way, even though the manual said you could order parts and gave you a diagram of all the parts! It isn’t cost effective for them to allow you to get a part and repair it yourself and usually want you to order a whole new unit.
Would you listen to yourself? If a dedicated storage RAID is too risky to trust, one can only imagine what you must think of Apple hardware. Totally unrepairable. You have to be careful with those Apple devices………. Apple won’t let you open the glued case let alone have a manual or order parts.