8big Rack, 5big and 2big external Thunderbolt 2 drives
LaCie has announced the 8big Rack, 5big and 2big external Thunderbolt 2 drives here at NAB 2014.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNCHYdtVlcM&w=640&h=360]The LaCie 8big Rack Thunderbolt 2 is the company’s first Thunderbolt 2 rackmount storage solution. It features up to eight 6TB 7200RPM hard drives from Seagate, for an impressive 48TB in a rackmount unit. A single unit can deliver speeds of up to 1330MB/s, and go go even higher when multiple units are ran together in parallel.
The LaCie 5big now features Thunderbolt 2, hardware RAID 5 and higher capacity 6TB 7200RPM drives. It is capable of delivering speeds of up to 1050MB/s. The 5-bay drive delivers up to 30TB in total capacity thanks to the new 6TB drives.
LaCie 2big features Thunderbolt 2, hardware RAID and a new design. It provides speeds up to 420MB/s along with two 6TB 7200RPM hard drives from Seagate. The 2big also features USB 3.0 in addition to Thunderbolt 2 for more compatibility across devices.
Pricing has not yet been released; however, LaCie says that all of these new drives should be available this quarter. Keep an eye out for them here at B&H Photo.
For those unfamiliar, Thunderbolt 2 is aptly-named as the second generation of Thunderbolt. It comes standard in the new Mac Pro but is not widely available yet. The good news is that it is backward compatible with first-gen Thunderbolt devices.
As far as specs go, Thunderbolt 2 delivers up to 20Gb/s using channel aggregation, while the original Thunderbolt delivers up 10Gb/s on each channel but across two channels simultaneously. The bottleneck occurs when you have a single device or parallel group that is capable of delivering more than the single channels on original Thunderbolt can provide.
