LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 2 - a professional external drive worthy of Apple

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-13 00:26

Five minutes of luxurious aesthetics for professionals and connoisseurs of beauty. Today Lifehacker has prepared for you an overview of a difficult disc. This is the top French LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 2 - 6 TB HDD, powered by SuperSpeed USB 3.0 and two Thunderbolt ports. It is encased in a Neil Poulton design aluminum case. Inside the storage, a 128 GB LaCie d2 SSD Upgrade is installed, effortlessly surpassing gigantic amounts of data in a matter of seconds.

And in order to immediately avoid inappropriate indignation in the comments, we in no way call this premium product "an affordable solution for everyone." The official price of a 6 TB HDD from the manufacturer is € 529. An additional SSD module costs another € 359. Total € 888. These are the things people who use non-name chargers for their iPhone 6 don't buy. You might just as well criticize those who choose Rolex and Omega over conventional mechanical watches.

LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 2 is acquired by professionals who work with graphics, video, other heavy content, as well as wealthy aesthetes. They sit at their Mac Pros, top-of-the-line 27”iMacs and MacBook Retina Pros in top-of-the-line range. The question of price for them is far from always primary. Well, if we are talking about external storage, which is 100% necessary when working with large amounts of data, then in their understanding such an accessory should be at least no worse than a computer standing next to it.

LaCie can provide such accessories. And it provides. Acquired by Seagate but retaining its identity, this French brand attracts very famous people, often from very different industries, to develop its products. Everyone knows the products of Doktor Ingenieur honoris causa Ferdinand Porsche Aktiengesellschaft, and the designers of this company create the forms not only of luxury cars, but also of individual models of LaCie drives.

In the case of the LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 2, the iconic Neil Poulton was the designer. The drive concept can be described as “aluminum, style and simplicity”. Indeed, this metallic miracle, perfectly in tune with Apple technology, does not have a single extra bend. Everything is strict and minimalistic. It was invented and created to stand next to the same iMac or MacBook and delight the owner with its look and amazing work.

Yes, and work too. Oftentimes, product design results in a loss of functionality, but we're talking about disk storage. The discs are inside and work to the best of their ability. Nothing bothers them. Six terabytes is a lot. Enough to store a large, very large project, moving its active part, that is, the one with which you are working right now, to an embedded SSD. An SSD combined with Thunderbolt delivers fantastic read and write speeds. You can see the measurements in the screenshots below.

And here is the SSD Upgrade installation process. There is only one small drawback here, which, however, is not relevant for Mac owners. We are talking about the loss of the USB 3.0 port. However, why is it needed when there is Thunderbolt?

When it comes to HDD speeds, the LaCie d2 Thunderbolt shows a crazy 200+ MB / s, which is essentially the limit for magnetic hard drives at the moment.

Vertical accessories are always a little more critical. It seems like this tower will fall down at the first opportunity, but even a fly can pull it off the table. This is not entirely true. LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 2 weighs 1.5 kilograms. And another 100 grams is added by the SSD. Shifting such a mass is not so easy, especially if it stands on an elastic rubber sole that resists shifting.