Digital Trends

LaCie 2big Triple (2TB) October 18th, 2007 | by Jason Tomczak

Features and Design

The "LaCie 2big Triple" is a very rugged drive with sexy-industrial overtones. The all-metal body has a brushed texture and clean, striking lines. It's built like a brick and weighs in at about 5 3/4lbs.

The back of the enclosure has one USB 2.0, one FireWire 400 and two FireWire 800 connections for super-fast data backups. On the Triple, the USB.20 transfer estimates are 60MB/s, FireWire 400 estimates are 50MB/s and FireWire 800 estimates are an impressive 100MB/s. These speeds are reported under RAID 0 configuration. The three data interfaces are the most common world-wide and will serve 99% or more of the drive's potential users.

The LaCie 2big Triple drive enclosure cools itself with an internal "thermo-regulated" fan, however the primary source of cooling is through the radiator-like metal body which acts as a full time passive heat sync. No matter how warm your hard drives get from intense use, the 2big Triple will dissipate the heat to help keep the hardware safe. Of course, if the ambient temperatures in your work environment exceed the internal temps of the drive enclosure, you may need to consider an active cooling system for your hardware. For everyone else, the Triple is plenty good at reducing heat.

One notable feature of the 2big Triple is the modifiable ways it can be stored. The Triple has a sturdy metal body with a screw-mounted metal foot plate, giving it good stability in an upright, solo configuration. The Triple is stackable and rack-mountable with a special rack system from LaCie.

The front of the LaCie 2big Triple RAID

RAID!

The best and most important feature of the LaCie 2big Triple 2TB RAID drive is the user selected type of RAID configuration for the removable, swappable drives. With the slightest effort, one can switch between RAID levels, giving you full redundancy, maximum disk space, two independent drives, etc. It's all about you and how you want to protect your data.

Specifically, the four disk management options are:

1. RAID 0 (aka FAST) which merges two drives - in this case, two 1TB drives - into what looks like a single 2TB drive. There is no data redundancy, so if one drive fails, your data is toast. RAID 0 is very popular due to the "doubled" drive size and extra speed associated with simultaneous data transfer to each drive, thereby speeding things up on a hardware level. Excellent for life in the fast lane, but bad, bad, bad for extra paranoid people who simply cannot, will not, dare not lose data. 

2. RAID 1 (aka SAFE 100) which mirrors two identical disks. If you have two 1TB drives in RAID 1, then you'll see a single 1TB drive when the Triple is plugged in to your computer. Data is being written to both hard drives and should one drive fail, no data will be lost. Simply insert another identical drive and the data safely stored on the non-failed disk will mirror over to the new drive. This is the best option for folks who want ultimate data protection and are willing to forsake overall drive size for peace of mind.

3. BIG MODE (aka hardware concatenation) merges two identical drives together for maximum capacity but, like RAID 0, there's no redundancy for data protection. Life on the edge. Livin' large.

4. JBOD MODE (aka independent disks) essentially turns off hardware RAID management and allocates a drive letter to each of the two internal hard drives. If you have two 1TB drives in the 2big Triple enclosure, then you'll see something like drive D: being 1TB and drive E: being 1TB. If there's any data redundancy, it's done on a human level. In other words, you'd be responsible for backing up to each drive. Also good for software-controlled RAID 0.

The 2TB version of the 2big Triple has two 1TB Hitachi Deskstar drives running at 7200 rpm. The drives are SATA 3.0GB/s and have 16MB cache each. Average seek time is less than 10 miliseconds.