thunderbolt 2 ssd external hard drive for mac

Once again there's no internal RAID controller, LaCie instead relies on software RAID-0 inside OS X. Note that LaCie may switch drive vendors at some point in the future, but my pre-production sample had XP941s inside. There are two 512GB of these SSDs inside the new LBD. In order to take advantage of the increased channel bandwidth of Thunderbolt 2, LaCie turned to Samsung's XP941 PCIe x2 SSD. Noise definitely wasn't a problem in my limited time with the pre-production sample. Inside the chassis you'll find a new thermally regulated fan that only spins up when necessary. On the back you'll find two Thunderbolt 2 ports and an input for the external power adapter. The new LBD goes black in an attempt to match the new Mac Pro. The new chassis looks a lot like the previous version, with an obvious difference in color. LaCie sent us a pre-production version of the new Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2, which I quickly tested with the new Mac Pro before flying out to Las Vegas for this year's CES. Once you take overhead into account, Intel claimed we should see a max of 1500MB/s in either direction for a Thunderbolt 2 enabled storage device.

Instead of offering two 10Gbps channels in each direction, Thunderbolt 2 combines them to offer up to 20Gbps in each direction. Thunderbolt 2 doesn't change the connector or even break backwards compatibility with previous designs, but it combines channels to make better use of the 40Gbps of aggregate bandwidth that Thunderbolt always offered. With the introduction of Macs equipped with Thunderbolt 2 (2013 MacBook Pro with Retina Display, 2013 Mac Pro), LaCie is updating the Little Big Disk to support the updated interface.

The result was a relatively portable way to add a bit of high-speed storage to your portable Mac. The original Little Big Disk combined two 2.5' HDDs or SSDs into a single, externally powered Thunderbolt enclosure. LaCie was among the first on the scene to support Intel (and Apple's) Thunderbolt specification with the Little Big Disk.

Thunderbolt 2 ssd external hard drive for mac