LaCie's 2big Thunderbolt 2 and Rugged Thunderbolt DAS Review

Concluding Remarks

LaCie's 2big Thunderbolt 2 and the Rugged Thunderbolt are both attractive pieces of technology. For users who just want a plug-and-play experience, both units just work. However, the scheme to change the RAID level is just not intuitive. A very similar problem existed with the LaCie 2big NAS that we reviewed a couple of years back when it came to starting from a diskless configuration. That issue has since been resolved in the later generation NAS units via the use of a dedicated boot up key. Hopefully, LaCie is able to do something for the future generation DAS units to resolve the non-intuitive requirements. We would have also liked to see the 6 TB enterprise drives being used in the unit, but given the cost, one really can't complain. The use of a high quality Noctua fan enables the unit to keep a low noise profile even under high loads.

The LaCie Desktop Manager program also needs some updates. Display of RAID rebuild progress would be nice. The ability to change the RAID level of the unit from within the program would also be quite useful. On Windows systems, we found that the program would recognize the units only over USB. In addition, TRIM capability seems to exist only over USB for the Rugged Thunderbolt SSD version. Though the last aspect is something dependent on the system / OS and the ncessity is also dependent on the nature of the Rugged workload, prospective consumers would do well to remember that and keep the Rugged connected over USB to maintain performance levels.

On the whole, LaCie has managed to deliver a compelling solution for multimedia professionals. The devices work as expected, performance seems to be good enough for the target market (given the device parameters) and pricing is in-line with similar units from other vendors. Thunderbolt's capabilities are best brought out in daisy chaining scenarios (as we saw that a single unit was able to get better performance over USB 3.0 in our testbed). So, it is definitely a great idea on LaCie's part to integrate both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt connectivity options in the 2big Thunderbolt 2 and Rugged Thunderbolt.