LaCie's 2big Thunderbolt 2 and Rugged Thunderbolt DAS Review
by Ganesh T S on July 9, 2014 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- LaCie
- Storage
- Seagate
- DAS
- Thunderbolt 2
Performance Evaluation - 2big Thunderbolt 2
The 2big Thunderbolt 2 unit ships by default in RAID 0 with a HFS+ file system. On Windows, connecting through the Thunderbolt port made it necessary for the device to be approved in the OS (Intel's Thunderbolt utility, which gets installed with the Thunderbolt drivers, pops up). We left the hardware selection in RAID 0 initially and used the Windows Disk Management utility to format the volume. The results of our performance evaluation of the RAID 0 volume through both Thunderbolt 2 and USB 3.0 are provided in the table below.
| LaCie 2big Thunderbolt 2 - RAID 0 Performance (MBps) | ||||
| USB 3.0 | Thunderbolt 2 | |||
| Read | Write | Read | Write | |
| Photos | 209.98 | 252.74 | 207.23 | 204.3 |
| Videos | 249.68 | 243.98 | 233.75 | 217.68 |
| Blu-ray Folder | 257.86 | 229.7 | 216.65 | 202.19 |
| Adobe Photoshop (Light) | 4.6 | 175.56 | 4.63 | 158.54 |
| Adobe Photoshop (Heavy) | 5.68 | 101.66 | 5.78 | 99.76 |
| Adobe After Effects | 4.55 | 53.34 | 4.54 | 27.53 |
| Adobe Illustrator | 4.77 | 142.19 | 4.8 | 87.58 |
Formatting the volume in RAID 1 involves powering down the unit and keeping the Selection button pressed while powering up. The RAID selection itself could be made with the lights in a blinking state and confirmed within 5 seconds of the start of the blinking. On the whole, it was not a very intuitive process, but nothing too difficult to handle once the instruction manual was perused. We repeated our performance evaluation with the RAID 1 volume.
| LaCie 2big Thunderbolt 2 - RAID 1 Performance (MBps) | ||||
| USB 3.0 | Thunderbolt 2 | |||
| Read | Write | Read | Write | |
| Photos | 116.18 | 158.17 | 115.34 | 135 |
| Videos | 145.32 | 137.45 | 140.14 | 114.61 |
| Blu-ray Folder | 144.35 | 141.72 | 132.05 | 113.79 |
| Adobe Photoshop (Light) | 5.81 | 144.98 | 5.44 | 131.63 |
| Adobe Photoshop (Heavy) | 7.06 | 93.51 | 6.61 | 90.92 |
| Adobe After Effects | 6.36 | 41.27 | 5.87 | 24.51 |
| Adobe Illustrator | 6.06 | 101.36 | 5.62 | 75.43 |
On the whole, at least on our Windows system, we found the device to perform better over USB 3.0 compared to Thunderbolt. RAID 0 has obvious performance benefits over RAID 1 for certain workloads.
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MikhailT - Friday, July 11, 2014 - link
WTF? You do realize these are DAS and has nothing to do with NAS nor does the devices have any server running?mschira - Friday, July 11, 2014 - link
I can't help finding this review a funny one. So the devices are faster via USB3 than with thunderbolt. (on a PC that is).So where is the usage scenario? Daisy chaining? Is that it? Am I unfair here or or is that ridiculous?
So the verdict should be brutal, right? Am I missing the sentence? Because I can't see it.
So where is the bottleneck?
M.