LaCie Portable External Thunderbolt 2 Device

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It's a real bomb! Forget the access time, in microseconds on SSD, not in milliseconds like on HDD. And the transfer rate can surpass 1GB, not Gb, per second!

LaCie said it's the fastest portable storage solution ever. Probably true. On its side, rival Promise Technology stated that its The Pegasus2 is the world's first and fastest Thunderbolt 2 hardware RAID storage solution (4 to 8 bays with SATA drives). That was true before LaCie's announcement. Promise also has another much smaller device compared to LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2, with two 256GB mSATA SSDs in RAID-0 and 1, the Pegasus J2, "the world's fastest and smallest Thunderbolt enabled storage," according to Promise. Smallest, yes, not anymore the fastest as it culminated at 750MB/s and only have Thunderbolt 1 interface, twice slower in both directions.

This latter one can be bus powered through the interface like the LaCie's unit delivered with an external power supply needed in the case of daisy-chained configurations.

LaCie has not officially revealed the source of the PCIe Gen 2 SSDs inside the unit but, according to an executive from LaCie, it's Samsung, that already signed a strategic partnership with Seagate on flash technology. The only known PCIe flash card from Samsung is the XP941 released last June in M.2 form factor and up to 512GB. Seagate announced last year X8 Accelerator PCIe Gen 2 Intel MLC flash cards powered by Virident Systems. But this start-up was later acquired by big rival WD. There are several other makers of PCIe SSDs including Adata, CoreRise, Extreme Engineering Solutions, Dulce, Foremay, Fusion-io, Intel, LSI, Mach Xtreme, MemoRight, OCZ/Toshiba, and Super Talent.

But what's the market for such a Ferrari in the external storage world? You need a powerful computer with a Thunderbolt 2 interface, a rarity up to now, new Power Pro from Apple being one of the exceptions. And this machine is already shipped with PCIe SSDs - up to 1TB - meaning that not all of their users will need to connect a pricey external unit like the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2 jewel. They will be essentially capacity-hungry users needing to work with more than 1TB of primary storage. Will it take a long time for this kind of LaCie's product to become popular? No, according to our source. "It's a gadget, it's expansive but we sell largely more than one hundred of the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2 per month now and we are increasing soon the production to reach one thousand per month."

Furthermore, other PC manufacturers are entering in workstations (not PCs) with Thunderbolt. HP is offering it as an option on its new HP Z1G2 Workstation starting at $1,999. Dell workstations could embrace Thunderbolt later this year.

Below is a comparison between the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 1 with two 2.5-inch HDDs - to be announced soon with Thunderbolt 2 for the same price - and the new Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2 with two silent PCIe SSDs, both of them from the same company and in exactly the same volume. There is no competition in term of access time and transfer rate but at a price/GB nine times higher. Even if ourc source precised:" We have better margins on external HDDs. We intentionnally down our margin on this SSD product to keep the price as low as possible."

Comparison Between Two LaCie Dual-Bay RAID With HDDs and SSDs