The 2BIG features LaCie’s familiar metal
case design, its ridged texture increasing the surface area so that the body
serves better as a heat sink.
In this case it’s warranted to dissipate
the energy loss of the two 3.5 inch hard disks mounted inside (a deeper ridge
around the middle reminds you this is a twin drive unit), but does make the
body a bit bulkier than comparable rivals.
Big blue. Though you may find it hard to shake the
feeling of being watched, LaCie’s desktop drive is great value and shows the
benefits of Thunderbolt performance
With a drive of this size, it’s only right
that you’ll find a second Thunderbolt port on the back for pass-through, so it
doesn’t matter if your Mac has only one port. A video capture box, display or
additional storage can be daisy chained to the downstream port.
What you might not like so much is the huge
illuminated button on the front, which lights up in blue whenever the drive is
receiving power. That’s easily remedied, though. Pressing the button parks the
disks without putting the whole enclosure to sleep, so it can continue to pass
voltage to any unpowered peripherals connected to the second port.
The disk bays are accessed from the rear.
Unscrew the lock with a coin and the drives which are mounted on small plates -
slide out. The disks are laid on their longest side, which contributes a little
to the drive having a larger footprint than some of its competitors. A small
app provided by LaCie sits in OS X’s menu bar, allowing you to check the status
of the disks, but you must deliberately do so by clicking the icon to open the
app before you can see what’s going on; it would be more appropriate for the
icon to change color to provide information at a glance.
Lacie 2big network
With the two disks set up as a striped RAID
array to maximise performance, the LaCie achieved average read and write speeds
of 327.8MB per second and 345.4MB per second respectively. Among the individual
results that contributed to these speeds, the minimum read and write speeds we
saw were more than 40MB per second slower. Even so, the minimum read and write
speeds were impressive for a hard disk, at 281.6MB and 299.6MB per second.
Despite the variation in transfer rates,
even the 2big’s slowest transfer speeds are incredibly fast compared to traditional
USB or FireWire storage. This is an excellent external drive for tasks that
demand maximum speed and lots of capacity.
Details
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Price
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$566; 6TB $753
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From
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lacie.com
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Needs
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Thunderbolt Mac * Mac OS X 10.6 or higher * Thunderbolt cable (not
supplied)
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Pro
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Consistently fast transfer rates * easily user-replaceable disks
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Con
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Audible when spinning up and down * relatively bulky design
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Rating
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5/5
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