Lacie launches the 12big desktop Thunderbolt 3 RAID storage unit

[HEXUS]

Up to 96TB capacity 12-bay solution is aimed at video pros working with 4K+ content.

Read more.

[aidanjt]

Pricing is yet to be announced.

It doesn't need to be to know that it'll be eyewatering.

[lumireleon]

2600MB/s and 2400MB/s in RAID 5 using mechanical drives that's SSD zone, I wonder how they do it in RAID configuration.

[DanceswithUnix]

2600MB/s and 2400MB/s in RAID 5 using mechanical drives that's SSD zone, I wonder how they do it in RAID configuration.

I expect they divide the disks into two stripes, 5 data + 1 parity in each.

They then put the pair of raid 5 stripes into a raid 0 set.

That would mean a large read operation would be reading from 10 drives in parallel, so if each drive can read 240MB/sec you get 2400MB/sec. That would be totally best case though, copying huge files around.

Mechanical drives are pretty fast for large reads and writes. It is the lack of seek time when doing lots of small reads and writes that is the win for SSD.

[lumireleon]

Mechanical drives are way cheaper to buy so it is a serious win for those on a budget but need serious speeds.

[DanceswithUnix]

Mechanical drives are way cheaper to buy so it is a serious win for those on a budget but need serious speeds.

Not really. 12 7200 rpm drives on my desk all whirring away? No thanks. If you really need that performance, stick it on a proper NAS on the other end of a 10Gbit ethernet link. Then it can live in a server room, and several people can share it lowering overall costs.

[Vorlon99]

Mechanical drives are way cheaper to buy so it is a serious win for those on a budget but need serious speeds.

Not really. 12 7200 rpm drives on my desk all whirring away? No thanks. If you really need that performance, stick it on a proper NAS on the other end of a 10Gbit ethernet link. Then it can live in a server room, and several people can share it lowering overall costs.

This is not going to be for 'those on a budget' unless it is of block buster proportions
I too would definitely think of having this somewhere away from the immediate work/desk area, unless the room is a bit cold and you need a bit of extra heat lol
This is a serious bit of Kit for an individual pro, or small team, with these kinds of storage requirements. In this day and age of massive volumes of digital content its a winner in my book.

[DanceswithUnix]

This is not going to be for 'those on a budget' unless it is of block buster proportions

These things aren't just about purchase cost, you need to back them up and maintain them. You don't want to scatter them around the building on people's desks because then they would need to leave their PC running for the backup to work, and as this seems to be basically a mahoosive USB stick to the OS, if you plug it into a Windows PC (most likely) then you don't get the snapshotting and remote replication features of a proper grown up NAS box.

So, if you are a one man business then one of these makes sense (apart possibly from the noise). But say you have a video editing department. If you have 10 PCs for video editing then assuming you go for drives like:

http://www.ebuyer.com/742196-wd-red-...ive-wd6002ffwx

then 12 of those is only £2800, so the drives for the whole department would only cost you £28K which probably wouldn't cover the cost of a decent NAS before you even start adding hard drives. But then you get the bits that really cost you money...

1/ What if one person wants to share files with the others? You drag them across the gigabit ethernet interface from one PC to the other, and manually try and track changes? You check stuff out from a central repository? That all involves long file transfer times.
2/ How do you back them all up?
3/ What happens when one of the units fails?
4/ Who is in charge of drive replacements when a drive fails in one of the stripes?

A proper NAS would have full hardware redundancy, hot backup drives, a backup schedule and possibly replication to a remote disaster recovery site to preserve data should the worst happen to the main office building.

[Moby-Dick]

The other concern with using this in a RAID 5 config is rebuild times. Statistally , you will get another disk failure during the rebuild as that much data needs to be moved around. You'll need at least a dual Parity or Mirrored-Striped type setup ( RAID 6 or 10 ) - or better still something that doesn't actually use RAID

[Vorlon99]

The other concern with using this in a RAID 5 config is rebuild times. Statistally , you will get another disk failure during the rebuild as that much data needs to be moved around. You'll need at least a dual Parity or Mirrored-Striped type setup ( RAID 6 or 10 ) - or better still something that doesn't actually use RAID

This has been a cause of concern for me for a while now... with the ever increasing size of drives generally the time to back up/replicate your data is getting massive... even from the point of view of a home user with a 1tb pocket drive... if you entrust all your photo's and music to one of these and forget to back up to a second drive at the very least, you stand to loose everything with a failure.... I know this goes without saying. As the drives get bigger, the prospect of huge loss of Data is more likely. So even as a home user with just 1 or 2 tb of data to store, a NAS with Raid is pretty much essential now.

[Moby-Dick]

go for the 3-2-1 rule

3 Copies ( including live )
2 different media
1 other site

[lumireleon]

...who said the Lacie storage accessory cannot be shared to a network?

[DanceswithUnix]

The other concern with using this in a RAID 5 config is rebuild times. Statistally , you will get another disk failure during the rebuild as that much data needs to be moved around. You'll need at least a dual Parity or Mirrored-Striped type setup ( RAID 6 or 10 ) - or better still something that doesn't actually use RAID

The spec says it can do RAID 6, which would seem OK on a 10+2 stripe setup. Looks like the performance isn't so good though compared with a crazy 11+1 RAID 5 or a more sane 5+1, 5+1 RAID 50 setup.

...who said the Lacie storage accessory cannot be shared to a network?

It doesn't have a network interface on it? OK you could plug it into a Windows workstation and click "share folder", but this isn't the 1990's so you wouldn't.

[kalniel]

...who said the Lacie storage accessory cannot be shared to a network?

See post #8

[acrilo]

That much storage... so little speed...

That is if you believe someone that specs a 12 drive raid0 at 2.4Gb/s. Switch to raid5 and you can quarter that speed.

I'm not a 5yo, how the heck would I believe 2.4Gb/s from mechanical raid0 stripes??? Maybe 2.4Gbps... maybe.

What a joke :/

[DanceswithUnix]

That much storage... so little speed...

That is if you believe someone that specs a 12 drive raid0 at 2.4Gb/s. Switch to raid5 and you can quarter that speed.

I'm not a 5yo, how the heck would I believe 2.4Gb/s from mechanical raid0 stripes??? Maybe 2.4Gbps... maybe.

What a joke :/

Because a single drive can manage 280MB/sec, check out the WD Black 4TB spinning rust at the top of this graph. The one at the top is a hybrid, so feel free to ignore that one.