“The Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2 [US$1299] is the latest in desktop storage from LaCie,” Albert Filice writes for Macworld. “Inside the sleek black enclosure are two ‘blade’ style PCIe SSDs that LaCie configures in a software RAID 0 to maximize the drive’s speed and storage capacity. Past Little Big Disk models featured 2.5-inch laptop drives, but these newer SSD modules connected to the PCIe bus allows speeds faster than SATA III.”
“The Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2 reads and writes like a real pro, and outpaces other desktop RAID solutions featuring up to six mechanical drives,” Filice writes. “The numbers speak for themselves; the Little Big Disk with Thunderbolt 2 easily outperformed what were previously our fastest drives.”
Much more in the full review here.
What the heck: I’ll take six, please!
“Excellent choice sir. That will be $7,794.00 plus tax. Credit or debit?”
Yea, that would be debtors’ prison for me.
Good to know that in 5 or 10 years time, this capability will be affordable for everyone.
Don’t feel badly, in 1986, I got a SuperMac Dataframe 20 SCSO HDD for my Mac 512KE. It cost $1399 with my UCLA discount. That’s 20 MEGABYTES kids!
Sorry, that’s “Dataframe 20 SCSI HDD”…
only the kids would have missed that one !-)
Aaahhh… SCSI Voodoo… To terminate or not to terminate? Perhaps a re-arrangement of the peripherals will help? Maybe double termination will set things right? Who knows? Those were the days.
I spent hours rearranging six SCSI peripherals, switching cables, and messing with bus termination on a Mac IIfx until all six components were recognized and worked correctly. It was even more exciting because of the mix of SCSI connectors – some had the huge (50-pin?) connectors and others had the more compact (25-pin?) D-sub versions – and the devices, some of which offered SCSI passthroughs and others that did not. Some components claimed to have internal bus termination, others had switches, others were unknown. It was a miracle that it ever worked, even on a Mac.
Even today, Mac connectivity is not a perfectly flawless operation – witness the hit-and-miss connection between my MBP and the keyboard attached to my 27″ Apple TB display. The mouse *always* works, but the keyboard is often in limbo after awaking from sleep or reconnecting after taking my MBP to a meeting. Then I have to use the old voodoo again – demate/remate the TB cable, demate/remate the keyboard USB cable, power cycle the Apple TB display, etc. Sometimes nothing works and I finally either restart my MBP or just reroute the keyboard USB cable to my MBP (thus somewhat defeating the purpose of having the expensive Apple TB display). Memories…
For $1299 if better be lightening fast.
Better than darkening slow.
On the subject of external storage, most recent Macs (even a Mac mini) have an SDXC card slot. If you’re not using that slot for anything, give it a try. You can get a 64GB SDXC card for less than $40.
It’s surprisingly fast. Not as fast as an internal SSD, but it seems faster than an internal hard drive, and definitely faster than external drives over USB 2.0 or FireWire. And you can boot from it, by formatting it for Mac and installing OS X. It would be a good place to install the Yosemite public beta, without the need to mess with your internal drive, or suffer slow performance by using an external hard drive.
Great tip, thanks.
and, well, out of the mage 10 LaCie 1, 2 or 5 GB firewire drives I ever owned, 8 broke for no reason and I have 2 still running, doing weird sounds… hmmmmmm.
hmmmm.
‘maybe’, not ‘mage’
…that is to say, the drives are doing the weird sounds, not me.
I once sold an Apple Profile, all 5 megabytes worth, for $3,499.
Connected to an Apple III.
And some “Man of the world” was always around to say, “Who would ever need that much storage?”
I advise against LaCie striped drives. I’ve had five of them – all but two being different models and then one day, one after another of them failed, costimg me several terabytes of data, including two decades worth of irreplaceaible work and irreplaceable family content.
LaCie charges a _minimum_ of $300 per disk to recover this data ($600 per enclosure). Considering that the data could be retrieved easily by simply transferring the drives to different enclosures, this is very high. The bill for me would be a minimum of $3,000.
I STRONGLY recommend that you consider a RAID 5 array, such as one from One World Computing.
RAID 0? That is asking for trouble, but then again you’re supposed to back up your data everyday.