Review: LaCie 2Big Dock aims to be your go-to Thunderbolt 3 working drive
By Jim Bask
I’ve been talking about storage a lot lately both privately among friends and here on Imaging Resource. Of all the members of the IR team, I’m probably the one who compiles the most data the fastest thanks mainly to my insistence on shooting 4Kp60 whenever possible (I love me some high quality, slow motion goodness). But that of course comes at a cost: how to manage my data. LaCie recently unveiled a new working drive, the LaCie 2Big Dock, and I’ve been using it over the last month in tandem with my MacBook Pro.
The LaCie 2Big dock combines two Seagate IronWolf Pro 7200 rpm SATA III enterprise-class six terabyte drives into one array that also sports a front-facing USB 3.0 Type-A, CF and UHS-II SD port.
On the backside of the array you’ll find two 40 gigabit per second Thunderbolt 3 ports and one 5 gigabit per second USB Type-C port. The array, when set to RAID 0 (which is the default), is slated to offer speeds of up to 440 MB/s. If you are upgrading or already have upgraded to a Thunderbolt 3 ecosystem, the two ports on the rear of the 2Big allow you to daisy-chain up to five additional Thunderbolt 3 peripherals together. Additionally, the USB-C port provides 27W of power for charging laptops, and the Thunderbolt 3 provides 15W. For the MacBook Pro, that doesn’t cover the needed 60 to 65W to fully charge, but it will slow down the rate at which the computer burns through its battery somewhat.
Finally, there is also a DisplayPort interface that supports up to 4K displays. So you can use the DisplayPort for up to 4K, and the Thunderbolt for up to two 4K monitors or one 5K monitor.
It’s designed to be an data ingestion tool as well as working drive, and for those purposes, I have found it woks pretty darn well. I tested the devices speed with both Thunderbolt 3 and USB-Type C connections, and as expected, Thunderbolt 3 is what you are going to want to use to get the max transfer rates out of this guy…[continue reading]