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LACIE 2BIG DOCK USER REVIEW
WORDS ADAM GARSTONE What Apple takes away from its MacBook Pro line, companies such as LaCie put back into their products LACIE 2BIG DOCK
LaCie claims that the drive is good for 440MB/s. Blackmagic’s disk speed test measured 415MB/s writes and 466MB/s reads, which is pretty good. It’s great to see those enterprise-class drives, too, as applications such as audio and video can really hammer the discs. Overall, the 2big Dock Thunderbolt 3 just oozes quality, and has a fantastically solid build. The drive caddy mechanism is smooth and precise – I really love those blue activity LEDs on the side of each caddy that’s a feature of LaCie’s current range. With the 8TB unit starting at about £480 plus VAT, and up to £1024 plus VAT for the 20TB unit, the extra cost for the ‘Dock’ features is minimal. If you are a MacBook Pro user looking for a drive and dock, it’s a real contender, and if you are just looking for an external Thunderbolt 3 RAID disc, you pretty much get the extras for free.
pre-formatted as the Mac’s HFS+, but you can reformat it for Windows of course, and LaCie’s RAID management software will allow you to reconfigure and monitor the 2big’s RAID setup. Unsurprisingly, given the product name, the unit has two Thunderbolt 3 ports on the rear, for connection to the computer and daisy-chaining, as well as a USB-C port. There’s a Kensington lock back here as well. The rear panel also sports a display port supporting up to 4k monitors (try saying that quickly ten times). Below the disc caddies on the front of the unit are an SD card reader, a CF card reader and a USB 3 socket. So, you can rock up with your MacBook Pro, plug in a single Thunderbolt cable, and get a big, fast disc, lots of I/O, and drive a big desktop monitor. The MacBook will even charge up over the Thunderbolt cable. Nice.
aCie’s 2big Dock Thunderbolt 3 is a very smart product – in almost every sense of the word. It looks fabulous, following LaCie’s current design aesthetic of solid aluminium housing with castings so sharp you can almost cut yourself on them (in a good way). It also would appeal to almost anyone who uses a computer, and who needs to store material from cards – photographers, musicians and, of course, filmmakers. NOT REALLY A DOCK It is, however, intended for those who use a laptop day to day, but who want to have a docking station at their desk. The 2big Dock has a pair of hot-swappable, enterprise-class (Seagate IronWolf Pro) hard discs, preconfigured as RAID 0. The unit is available in 8TB, 12TB, 16TB and 20TB capacities – we tested the largest in the range. The unit comes
ABOVE Handsome, solidly built, with plenty of extras – the 2big Dock really is a superhero.
IT WOULD APPEAL TO ALMOST ANYONE WHO USES A COMPUTER
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FEBRUARY 2018 DEFINITION
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