“We wanted to know if two striped drives in the LaCie Little Big Disk (LBD) Thunderbolt would transfer data as fast as the same two drives in the Promise Pegasus X4,” rob-ART Morgan reports for Bare Feats.
“To stress both enclosures to the limit, we used dual 6Gb/s solid state drives (SSDs),” Morgan reports. “Then for perspective, we included two models of notebook hard disk drives (HDDs).”
Morgan reports, “The Promise Pegasus R4 writes large sequential data files (captures video) significantly faster than the LaCie Little Big Disk when both are using SSDs. This is significant in that, according to the data rate calculators, 2048×1556 10-bit RGB 29.97 fps video requires 382MB/s to avoid dropped frames. The LBD falls short of this target. The Pegasus exceeds that target with either dual 6G SSDs or quad HDDs.”
Much more, including benchmarks, the full article here.
Man, I can’t wait until my dad gets a job!
The new Hobbit film by Peter Jackson is done with Red cameras at 60 frames per second. This would require even more bandwidth — possibly full 20 Gbit/s capacity of Thunderbolt.
Actually is 48fps 🙂
Oh yes, sorry; I stand corrected.
I would so never buy another LaCie product ever again. They treated me badly in the past, and I don’t forget.
No disrespect, but maybe after a year or two you could try them again. I’m in sales and marketing. Recently I met a customer who complained that we didn’t treat him well on a previous purchase. That was in 1988! At some point you have to think that there are different people there and give them a second chance.
Alas LaCie continues to not fare well as indicated here:
http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/harddrives/index.html#d08nov2011
Nigel Ellis’ experience is quite exasperating
Their support policies have disappointed me in the past when the S2S RAID was EOLed less than two years after being discontinued. However, their drives have been fairly reliable for me. In the past 8 years, I’ve owned four P2 drives, three D2 DVD burners, two Big Disks, two S2S RAIDs, a 4Big, a Rugged, a Little Disk and a Little Big Disk. I’ve had one P2 drive crash but recover after a low-level partition, and one Big Disk has required a new power supply. That’s it. A few colleagues have also had the latter problem. Failing power supplies on drives made 2002-2008 have been the main issue, as far as I can tell, and that’s an issue that, if you know about it, is easily resolved. For a while, LaCie was providing free replacements, even out-of-warranty. In any case, buying a $20 power supply seems like a pretty painless fix to me. And, the competition doesn’t seem to be doing any better. I know a lot of tech heads, and among them there have been drive failures of almost every brand you can think of, including some pricey “high-end” brands.