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Pros
- Supports RAID Level 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10.
- Allows for hot-swapping of drives in certain configurations.
- 4K video editing speed.
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Cons
- No USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 or USB 3.0 ports.
The LaCie 5big Thunderbolt 2 is a large-capacity hard drive made for those who need up to 40TB of storage on hand and accessible at a moment's notice—and who are able to swing the $3,999 price. Admittedly, the 5big($2,221.29 at Amazon) appeals to a narrow group: scientists who need to analyze huge amounts of data, professional photographers, videographers working at 4K and higher resolutions, and anyone who needs the ability to connect drives for up to a petabyte of local storage. True, the drive USB-C or Thunderbolt 3, but if you are constantly deleting files to make room on your 8TB drive, then the 5big might be right for you.
Design and Features
Like the earlier 5big( at Amazon), this drive looks like a large (7.7-by-6.8-by-8.7-inch, HWD) block of aluminum. It matches the color and design of premium systems like the Apple iMac( at Amazon), plus the metal exterior helps cool the drives. The front of the case is featureless save for a large, hemispherical, blue-LED-backlit Power button that does double duty as the drive activity and power indicators. As with the previous version, the drives can be daisy-chained and stacked, so you can connect up to 36 LaCie 5big drives (for 1,150TB, or more than 1 petabyte of storage) to an Apple Mac Pro. Our iMac testbed can handle 12 drives simultaneously.
The drive's back panel has a pair of 20Gbps Thunderbolt 2 ports, an AC adapter port, a Kensington lock port, and the exhaust grill for the cooling fan. The Thunderbolt ports can be daisy-chained to other drives, and can pass through video to Thunderbolt-compatible displays. The drive notably lacks a USB 3.0 or combination USB-C–Thunderbolt 3 port, which means that the drive is better suited for a design studio or development firm that currently uses Thunderbolt- or Thunderbolt 2–equipped Macs and PCs. The 5big comes formatted HFS+, for the drive's primary audience of Mac users. You can, of course, reformat the drive exFAT or NTFS for use on a Windows PC.
As its name implies, the 5big comes with five populated drive bays. The drives are all on sleds, making them easily swappable should you need to physically archive their data. You can set up the drive in any of five RAID levels (0, 1, 5, 6, and 10) or a "just a bunch of drives" (JBOD) configuration, but for speed, data integrity, and capacity, in testing, we kept the 5big in its default RAID Level 5 configuration. This gives you an insane 32TB of drive space using five 8TB drives, which is server-level capacity. RAID Level 5 also makes it possible to hot-swap a failed internal drive quickly.
You'll need to download LaCie's RAID manager software to set up and use the drive, but the utility also helps monitor the drive or change RAID levels. In theory, you could format each of the five drives individually for a daily 8TB backup during the workweek, but most users will probably want a 32TB bucket for active use on projects. The drive comes with a five-year warranty.
Performance and Pricing
As you can imagine, having five 7,200rpm enterprise-class hard drives spinning in unison helps the 5big achieve excellent throughput results. On the Blackmagic drive test, the 5big Thunderbolt 2 returned a speedy rate of 852.6MBps read and 881.7MBps write. At that rate, you can edit multiple 720p, 1080p, and 4K video streams on the fly, provided your Mac or PC is fast enough, since the Blackmagic test showed success for all tests except for the highest load (4K at 60 frames per second, or fps, with 10-bit video). That's faster than the original 5big (650.9MBps read, 742.2MBps write), the G-Technology G-Speed Studio( at Amazon) (515.9MBps read, 563.9MBps write), and the CalDigit T4 RAID( at Amazon) (527MBps read, 502MBps write), though the LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2 (1,135.2MBps read, 1,099.1MBps write) remains our speed leader due to its dual internal solid-state drives (it aced all of the Blackmagic tests). In summation, the 5big Thunderbolt 2 is the fastest RAID array we've tested that uses traditional hard drives.
At $3,999, storage value measures about 10 cents per gigabyte in RAID Level 0 (40TB), and about 12 cents per gigabyte in the default 32GB RAID Level 5 array. It's also available in a 10TB capacity for $1,299, 20TB for $1,999, and 30TB for $2,699. Our tested configuration is a good value compared with the G-Speed Studio (20 cents per gigabyte), the Promise Pegasus2 R2+( at Amazon) (12 cents per gigabyte), and the CalDigit T4 RAID (20 cents per gigabyte). The 5big really shows its value when compared with the $1.29 per gigabyte you'll have to pay for the LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2. You really are paying for (just a bit) of extra speed in the latter's case.
If you're the type of user who keeps 4K video libraries spooled up for daily projects, you're going to want a drive like the LaCie 5big Thunderbolt 2 hooked up to your workstation. It's simply one of the largest storage appliances we've seen outside of an enterprise-class NAS or server. At 20 cents per gigabyte, it's a good value, even though the final price tag might make you pause. It will serve scientific users with large multi-terabyte databases, technical managers in charge of large CGI projects, photographers, and videographers equally well. Its combination of speed, capacity, and value help the 5big leapfrog the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2 as our newest Editors' Choice for high-end desktop external drives. While the Little Big Disk is still a bit faster on our benchmark tests, the 5big can match it on all but the most arduous 4K video projects, plus it has 32 times the capacity.
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