Standard RAID levels

One of the reasons I like Macs is that their useful life tends to be significantly longer than that of a typical Windows machine. This is especially true of the pre-Retina MacBook Pro models, where it’s trivial to upgrade both the RAM and the drive.

I’d previously swapped out the 750GB hard drive and optical drive that came with my late-2011 MacBook Pro 17 for two 1TB hard drives. Along with a RAM upgrade, that gave me a 16GB RAM, 2TB hard drive machine. The plan was to use the machine in that form for a year or two, then do a further upgrade to SSDs once 1TB models arrived and fell to a halfway sensible price.

When that finally happened, and I did the upgrade, that gave me two 1TB hard drives surplus to requirements. I could have placed each into its own external drive caddy, but one 2TB drive is more useful than two 1TB ones, so I decided instead to try out OWC’s Mercury Elite Pro mini. This is an external enclosure for two 2.5-inch drives, which supports both USB 3 and Firewire 800, drawing power from either source – making it a portable drive without the need for external power … 
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06tyNTAMzIk]

Noting a successful run with its Thunderbolt-supported Little Big Disk, LaCie’s latest Thunderbolt peripheral the 2big Thunderbolt Series is now available. Originally announced in January during CES 2012, the peripherals offer speeds up to 327MB/s, hot-swappable disks, RAID security, and of course the ability to daisy chain through Thunderbolt. To put this in perspective, the 2big offers speeds up to three times FireWire 800. Daisy chaining multiple 2bigs can get you up to 676MB/s Read (or more).

As for the design, LaCie noted the “thermo-regulated, ultra-quiet cooling fan” automatically triggers depending on the temperature, and the solid-aluminum enclosure fits nicely into LaCie d2 Desk Rack and 19-inch Rackmount Kit. You will have to grab your Thunderbolt cables from Apple, but the 2big Thunderbolt series itself will run you $650 for the base 4TB option, or $800 for the 6TB option (an 8TB option is listed but not yet available or priced). When it comes to LaCie’s advertised speeds, the company used the AJA System Test with a 17-inch, 2.2Ghz Quad Core MacBook Pro (4GB RAM) connected to the 6TB 2big model in RAID 0. The comparison chart from LaCie’s AJA tests daisy chaining multiple 2bigs is below.

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