UNSCIENTIFIC TESTS
Just copied at single 1.69 GByte movie file to the Lacie Thunderbolt disk, and then copied the same file to a USB 2 external disk. results below:
• File Size: 1.69 GByte
• LaCie 2 TB Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series Hard Drive: 12 seconds
• Generic USB 2 external disk: 67 seconds
By my calculations, the Lacie moves data at 140 MByte/s, or 1.13 Gbit/s. The generic USB 2 disk moves data at 25 MByte/s, or 140 Gbit/s. That’s a clear 5.6 times speed increase.
Compared to the specs, the Lacie claims 190 MByte/s. So not hat close but then my timings may be a second or two out either way. USB 2 has a theoretical speed of 480 Mbit/s (60 MByte/s), so my USB drive is achieving less that half it’s theoretical speed. Mind you, Lacie talk of speeds up to 10 Gbit/s, so by that measure my Lacie disk is performing terribly.
The Lacie has two disks in a preconfigured RAID0 configuration, so data is shared to both drives. that obviously overcome some of the speed limitations of a hard disk.
IN GENERAL USE
In day-to-day use, the Lacie is light-years ahead of the USB disk. I have a largish photo library of 15,000 photos, and on the USB disk it is painful to move between photos – it takes 2-4 seconds for each photo to load. With the Lacie I can scroll through and see the previews, and it loads each photo instantaneously (there is no noticeable lag).
IS IT WORTH THE MONEY?
So, overall, is it worth the cost? For me, yes – I used to hate using Aperture because of the file loading issues. Now, it’s fine, and I can edit and scroll through my photos with no problems.
I’d recommend it if you can live with the bad points I mentioned here.