LaCie 2Big Quadra Hard drive for Pro Video and Photography

Hi. Guy Cochran here today. We're going to be taking a look at a new drive
from LaCie. And the thing that makes this one interesting and very unique
versus some of the competition out there is that this one doesn't just do
RAID 0. So it is a two-drive enclosure, but what it does is it's able to do
something a little different. This is call RAID 0+1. So in the back
here you're going to see something that says safe, mixed, big and fast.
So we've got it in mixed mode which is the RAID 0+1 right now and I
want to fire this thing up into our Mac and you guys are going to be able
to see what it looks like when we run some high speed tests.
So on our desktop here we have something here called the AJA system test and
some of you may be very familiar with this and you know that you can feed
1920x1080 10bit and that's some really high quality video. Let's change the
file size all the way up to the 4 GB mark and let's just see what happens.
Let me zoom in here too so that you guys can see what happens if I turn on
my zoom. So I can make this a little bit bigger and let you guys see the
test, as well.
So we've got our volume. This is the LaCie fast drive. So inside of this
drive right here, there's two drives. Now, normally, you would partition
this however you like but what we've done is we've partitioned it in the 0+1 mode. So
we're able to get both a backup and a fast partition at the
same time.
What does this mean to you? Let's say for instance that you're a
photographer and as you're scrolling through your Aperture library you want
to be able to cruise through a ton of pictures very quickly and find just
the one that you're going after. Now if you have a drive that is mirrored
it's going to be very slow. So the benefit of this drive is that included
in the box and included with a Mac, if you're on a PC there's software in
the box that's included, that will allow you to back up the volume. So you
take your fast volume and you're able to back it up automatically with
Apple's, the new operating system, you're able to use Time Machine and just
automatically back it up in the middle of the night.
So, speed and redundancy is what we've all been wanting but in an
affordable package. I happen to use another drive from another manufacturer
that's very, very fast but it costs around four, five, six times as much
for around the same capacity. So you're talking about a RAID that is a RAID
6. It's an 8 drive system, it's sitting down here and it's very cool and it
can push up to 600MB per second but most people don't need that kind of
speed. They don't need 600. They need about 200MB and we're going to see
how this thing pushes that 200MB.
So let's go ahead and start the test here and take a look at that. We're
hitting 200MB a second with our writes, with our reads, it's coming up
here. This is our fast drive. So man, this is amazing to get this kind of
performance out of an inexpensive two-drive system that's got some
redundancy to it as well. So that's our write speed hitting 200 and 17.
Let's see what our reads are getting. Man that is just cooking along. So if
you were to get a drive like this from another manufacturer and just put it
in RAID 0 mode, you're going to get faster speeds than this. I think we
were able to get up to 300MB per second and we are using a controller card.
We're using a four port card and getting this kind of speed.
So I'll show you a picture of that card real quick. That card, let's zoom
out, looks like this one right here. So this is the four port card and if
you look at the back of the drive, let me cut over so you guys can see the
back of the card real quick, and let's kind of pan down here or tilt down,
excuse me. So if we tilt down you'll be able to see that you have a USB
2.0. You have 2 firewire 800 ports, a firewire 400, and this is the SATA
cable that is currently plugged in and you can hear something if I get
really close to this. Hey, what do you know, Mr. Bob Zelin,
there's a fan right inside of that little tiny hole right there. So you
asked for it, you got it. There's a fan inside there that kicks on, not to
mention you get these grills that dissipate heat as well very efficiently.
So let's jump back over to the computer side really quick and let's do
another test on the system side. Let's see, we want to go from the fast
drive to the safe drive. Let's see what that looks like when we hit start.
Let me zoom in so you guys can get an idea. So this one here is still
pushing a good 100MB a second which is pretty darn fast again. Your
internal drive, your SATA drive that comes inside your computer is going to
be hitting about 100MB. So when you get two drives together it makes them
faster and this case we're not only using the two drives to make it fast,
but we're also using the two drives to make it redundant. So if a drive
fails, you're going to have everything that's on that safe drive still on
that safe drive. This is awesome.
If you're shooting with P2, shooting with Sony SxS, shooting stills with
your Canon 5D or Nikon you want that stuff backed up. You don't want your
data in just one place. You want it in two places always. I would also
suggest even making another copy of this drive and taking it off site if
that data is very valuable. So just having this drive though is great piece
of mind. Having your data in two places, it will help you sleep better at
night.
So let's take a look at what's going on here. We're hitting write speeds at
about 100, reads of 100. Now why is this speed important when we get into
an application like Aperture? For those of you that are photographers out
there, so that this is just about finished. Actually why we're waiting for
that to finish, I'm going to show you a quick PDF here. Let's jump back
over to preview mode and let's take a look at this here.
So you can see what happens in the different RAID configurations. RAID 0,
let's get me back up on the screen, RAID 0, you're going to have all your
capacity but you're going to have no protection. In fact there shouldn't
even be a star there. I wish I could just take that out and just [sound].
It's going to be really fast but you have no protection. And the next one,
this is basically your "Big" where you're able to write, when one drive fills
up it goes to the next one, so that's your "Big". And then this is the one
that is "Safe" where it's a total mirror so you've got lots of protection,
but you take the speed hit.
And then here it's kind of a mixed bag. You're getting 75% of the capacity
but you're getting protection and you're getting speed. So is that speed
fast enough? I think it's fast enough. Let's take a look at what it looks
like when we jump over to Aperture. So if you're a photographer, this is
going to look familiar. Here's my Aperture library. Now let's just see what
it looks like as we scroll though. Look at that. As we scroll through our
photos and we even double click on a photo, look at how fast it loads and
look at how fast, that was kind of cool, look at it. It turned the light on
and turned the light off. Look at how fast we're able to cruise through all
these photos and I can even go faster. So I'm just scrolling fast, fast,
fast. So that's the kind of speed that you want, 200MB per second, you're
going to be able to cruise through your photos really quick. You're doing a
photo shoot and you want to find just that right picture, you've got the
client over your shoulder. You don't want to be waiting for the onscreen
preview to redraw. So, once again, this is the LaCie 2Big Quadra. You might
want to take a look at getting one.