LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 2 DAS Review

Concluding Remarks

LaCie is targeting multimedia professionals, prosumers and Mac users with the d2 Thunderbolt 2. The marketing collateral has claims of up to 220 MBps speeds with the HDD and 1150 MBps with the SSD, both of which are close to what we saw in our own benchmarking. The availability of both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt 2 interfaces provides wider compatibility. Consumers can make use of the unit without even entering the Thunderbolt ecosystem. The industrial design (particularly, the base of the unit) manages to reduce vibrations during operation. The storage devices themselves can't saturate the Thunderbolt 2 bandwidth. The appeal obviously lies in the daisy-chaining capabilities. On the software side, LaCie provides encryption and backup capabilities for both Windows and Mac.

After processing the benchmarks on the DAS, we continued stressing it with more data transfers (reading and writing video files for a few hours at a time). We found that the hard drive was getting quite hot. Running a health check-up with the S.M.A.R.T test showed a 'failure' in the airflow temperature (the disk temperature itself was around 53C, which is hot, but not enough for drive failure - that S.M.A.R.T attribute didn't indicate a failure)

Even though our benchmarking completed without any problems, we did see that the HDD had begun to act a bit strange (long response time to transactions - irrespective of whether USB3 or Thunderbolt 2 was being used). We are not sure whether that is related to the interface CRC errors reported in the above screenshot. We didn't face any such troubles with the PCIe SSD, though.

The passive thermal solution for the HDD-only configuration is touted as a key selling point by LaCie, but, to tell the truth, we are not entirely convinced yet. Even though the S.M.A.R.T reports never indicated operating temperatures beyond 56C, the failed airflow temperature metric is a cause of concern for us. LaCie is also silent on whether users can replace the hard drives at their end. I am waiting to hear back from them before slotting in another drive to re-check the thermal performance. [Update: LaCie indicated that the hard drive firmware shipped with our early sample review unit was not the same as the one being shipped to end users. We will update the benchmark numbrs and have closure on the thermal issues after testing a unit with an updated firmware] Other than these two aspects, the d2 Thunderbolt 2 is an innovative and compelling product for multimedia professionals already invested in the Thunderbolt ecosystem.

At IDF 2014, we saw Intel's commitment to broaden the appeal of Thunderbolt beyond the Mac ecosystem. Dual interface devices such as the LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 2 serve an important role in this process. Hopefully, we will see Thunderbolt continue to gain popularity amongst PC users. The LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 2 comes with a 3-year warranty. The 3 TB, 4 TB and 6 TB versions priced at $299, $399 and $499 respectively. The 128 GB LaCie d2 SSD Upgrade will be priced at $299, with availability slated for October. An USB 3.0-only version of the unit (LaCie d2) will also be made available next month. From an evaluation perspective, we hope to be able to compare performance on Windows and Mac for the same kit sometime in the near future. That might give Microsoft a few reasons to provide more support for the Thunderbolt ecosystem from their side.