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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ssj3gohan - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
So... thunderbolt is slower, more power hungry and more expensive than USB 3.0. And it's effectively unavailable. I can see why Intel integrates USB 3.0 into their chipsets and not Thunderbolt.Of course, I understand that this is a function of volume; Thunderbolt doesn't really sell and is an Intel exclusive whereas USB 3.0 controllers are made by every man and his dog, so it's much more optimized both in cost and data stream efficiency, not to mention driver compatibility. But this still begs the question: why even include Thunderbolt? It's objectively worse than USB 3.0 and just needlessly increases the price of both Apple and peripheral products.
mmrezaie - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
I would like to see the benchmarks under Mac OS too. They don't rely on bios drivers for thunderbolt and use their own. I think Linux will have the same driver later this year but I think on Mac thunderbolt driver is more optimised.Essence_of_War - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
Agreed. I'd really like to see a USB 3.0-Thunderbolt shoot-out under OS X and Linux as well!I don't know if this is possible Ganesh, but if you could get access to a mac with thunderbolt, it would be pretty neat to see! :)
techwiz2100 - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
Yea I'm a little concerned by these numbers, I mean... Isn't the Mac Pro supposed to be able to drive a 4K display over TB2? I would imagine that's a much more bandwidth heavy application than file transfer. Also maybe the devices themselves or the add-on card are the limitations?Essence_of_War - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
Yeah, I think it's pretty clear that in no case is the theoretical limit of TB being saturated.It's possible that the speed differences are within the margin of error, but my first guess would be some sort of driver/controller issue for TB on Windows.
M/2 - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
I'm a Big Mac Mini fan... I've been trying to rationalize TB, and just can't quite get there. I use external drive over the network for media and backups. I wound up buying a 4-bay USB 3.0 box for $250; with 4-4Tb drives, I have 12Tb of RAID 5 storage for under $1000. So I really don't get the price tag on a 2-bay TB drive.I get 230 MB/s on Blackmagic. That's not that much slower than my buddy's Promise 2 RAID, the reason being the spinning drive are the main limiting factor. And, 30+ % cheaper. And 230 is fast enough for anything I need . You really need 6 bays or SSDs to take advantage of TB.
If I had to do it over, I'd consider the OWC thunderbay box. $450 vs. $250 for the Dyconn Quartz4 box I bought. Just depends what you're using if for. I'm almost there!
M/2 - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
I may be off on the TB speeds. ..just looked at a review on owc , it's twice the speed of USB 3 on RAID 5 ... Like I said, I might decide different todayganeshts - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
As I mentioned in the concluding remarks, for these particular devices, TB is useful only in the daisy chaining scenario. Otherwise, USB 3.0 is going to deliver better performance.Apologies for not testing with Macs. I should have probably noted in the very beginning that we are going to start monitoring Thunderbolt performance on Windows from my side. For Mac-based coverage, Anand is the best bet (for example, the LaCie Little Big Disk review that he put out earlier this year -- which I have also linked in the article).
M/2 - Thursday, July 10, 2014 - link
Agreed! USB 3.0 beats any 1 or 2 drive configuration (IMO), simply because because the drives can 't fill the TB bandwidth (unless you're using SSDs). Sure, TB is cool, but adding USB3 would make a more versatile package.FYI, I see the OWC thunderbay price is now $500, up $50, people must be buying them. Still too much of a premium IMO (unless you're using SSDs and/or really need 500+ Mb/s)
ciparis - Friday, July 11, 2014 - link
You really need to include the Mac numbers; otherwise, nobody will be holding PC manufacturers to task in making these devices perform remotely near their potential. The current situation is abysmal, and with zero reason other than near total incompetence.