LaCie announces USB-C 2big RAID & 8-terabyte Rugged RAID Shuttle

AppleInsider

Storage maker LaCie is launching two new pro-oriented RAID products, the Rugged RAID Shuttle and the 2big RAID, both featuring USB-C connectivity.

The Rugged RAID Shuttle is portable model available in a single 8 terabyte capacity, and can operate in either RAID 0 or 1, the former for maximum performance and the latter for redundancy. In RAID 0 it offers speeds up to 250 megabytes per second.

While it connects to both Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C, port speeds are limited to the 5 gigabits per second of USB 3.1 Gen 1. Both Thunderbolt/USB-C and USB-C-to-USB-A cables are included in the box.

The unit is surrounded by an orange rubber shell helping to protect against drops up to 4 feet. The layer also aids the drive's IP54 rating against water and dust.

The stationary 2big RAID comes pre-formatted for exFAT, and can operate at much faster speeds, up to 440 megabytes per second. Its Thunderbolt 3/USB-C port offers USB 3.1 Gen 2 bandwidth up to 10 gigabits per second.

The 2big RAID is shipping later this month in 4-, 8-, and 16-terabyte capacities, costing $419, $529, and $739, respectively. The Rugged RAID Shuttle is due in May for $529.99.

22july2013

I have set up and worked with RAID in the past. But the average consumer doesn't care about RAID and therefore won't buy it. What some company needs to do, if they want to sell their product, is innovate. Specifically, someone needs to invent a drive that changes its own RAID configuration automatically depending upon how the data is accessed and how much data there is. For example, if less than 10% of the drive's space is being used, it should implement mirroring. If certain files are being accessed a lot it should implement striping. (And perhaps even a simultaneous mix of striping and mirroring.) And it should dynamically change as the user's needs change. In a way Apple's Fusion drive technology is already a step in this direction: files are moved between HDD and SSD as the drive sees fit, without knowledge of the user. This synthesis approach ("SynDrive" - I just coined that word, and a Google search indicates that word is not used much) should work on either HDD or SSD memory devices. For SynHDDs you probably require multiple HDDs and for SynSSDs you probably require multiple SSDs or you may not be gaining very much. I think either the OS or the physical device could handle the details, but it's more likely in the OS because device manufacturers historically don't write much software. I hope we see this innovation before I die. Oh, here's another good name for this innovation: BlenDrive. P.S. There needs to be two separate cables going into the BlenDrive to allow for redundancy in the physical drive controllers. And in the spirit of the round pizza box by Apple, the new Apple SynHDD should be cylindrical because HDD disk platters are circular.   

seanj

Well I use Raid 1 disk mirroring at home, but I’m looking now at replacing my ‘spinning rust’ HDDs with SSDs. SanDisk have decent Terabyte portables that use USB 3.1 Gen 2 bandwidth and the new Samsung Thunderbolt 3 drive is almost as fast as a Mac’s internal SSD!

jintech

Every Lacie drive I have ever purchased (four) in the past failed. I always unmount before disconnecting or powering off. Every other drive I have purchased from every other maker has not. I am not sure what their failure rates are these days?

larryjw

Raid 0 and Raid 1 seem merely marketing designations -- not the kinds of Raid a pro would need. 

dewme

22july2013 said:

I have set up and worked with RAID in the past. But the average consumer doesn't care about RAID and therefore won't buy it. What some company needs to do, if they want to sell their product, is innovate. Specifically, someone needs to invent a drive that changes its own RAID configuration automatically depending upon how the data is accessed and how much data there is. For example, if less than 10% of the drive's space is being used, it should implement mirroring. If certain files are being accessed a lot it should implement striping. (And perhaps even a simultaneous mix of striping and mirroring.) And it should dynamically change as the user's needs change. In a way Apple's Fusion drive technology is already a step in this direction: files are moved between HDD and SSD as the drive sees fit, without knowledge of the user. This synthesis approach ("SynDrive" - I just coined that word, and a Google search indicates that word is not used much) should work on either HDD or SSD memory devices. For SynHDDs you probably require multiple HDDs and for SynSSDs you probably require multiple SSDs or you may not be gaining very much. I think either the OS or the physical device could handle the details, but it's more likely in the OS because device manufacturers historically don't write much software. I hope we see this innovation before I die. Oh, here's another good name for this innovation: BlenDrive. P.S. There needs to be two separate cables going into the BlenDrive to allow for redundancy in the physical drive controllers. And in the spirit of the round pizza box by Apple, the new Apple SynHDD should be cylindrical because HDD disk platters are circular.   

The average consumer is really no different than an IT solution architect - each one buys systems that meet their predominant requirements and satisfy their purposeful objectives. For many consumers fault tolerance, hot swapping storage volumes, reducing data access latencies in millisecond time frames, and automatic error detection and correction at bit and byte level aren’t even part of the conversation. Hiding or disguising a purpose driven design strategy, as the different flavors of RAID provide, in a consumer product that has no demand for such capabilities could be a waste of resources, time, and incur additional costs without delivering additional value.  

Apple's Fusion (hybrid) design is a very traditional caching strategy. All caching strategies are based on a statistically affirmed knowledge of how data is referenced by running programs in time and/or space and where a natural bottleneck exists, which for nearly all computing platforms based on Von Neumann architecture is memory, backing storage, and caching hierarchies. In other words, programs tend to make multiple memory requests for data that was recently requested and/or memory locations adjacent to ones that have already been referenced. This is a very different strategy than what is driving the design of RAID systems.

I understand the notion of adaptive processing, say what you’d implement for load balancing, elasticity, scalability, etc. But again, if that’s the purposeful objective that’s driving the design strategy why mix in a design like RAID that was driven an entirely different purpose, much less two different types of RAID that serve two different purposes? Dynamically reconfiguring a storage element on the fly from one RAID strategy whose purpose is performance to another RAID strategy whose purpose is fault tolerance based on data access patterns or storage demand would be very confusing to say the least. At what point would the user or client know that the underlying rules of the game were changed - whether they like the change or not? As a client or consumer I always want to know that the contract that I signed up for is adhered to in a deterministic manner over the life of the contract. Every RAID strategy comes with an implied “contract” between client and provider. 

steveau

JinTech said:

Every Lacie drive I have ever purchased (four) in the past failed. I always unmount before disconnecting or powering off. Every other drive I have purchased from every other maker has not. I am not sure what their failure rates are these days?

Interesting! I have two LaCie 2TB Rugged Mini Portable Hard Drives and a LaCie Porsche Design 2TB Hard Drive. The two ruggeds are fail-safe backups and live in my safe, they have never failed. The Porsche Design is my permanently attached TimeMachine drive. (I used to have a beautiful TimeCapsule, sigh!) With the Porsche Design, if I do not do a full shut down at the end of every session then, sometime in the night, the Porsche Design WILL fail and the only way to fix it is to do a forced shut down, turn the Porsche Design off, start my MacBook Pro and after full boot up, restart the Porsche Design. A pain, but not worth replacing the drive for. However, I certainly wouldn't buy another one.

mariowinco

JinTech said:

Every Lacie drive I have ever purchased (four) in the past failed. I always unmount before disconnecting or powering off. Every other drive I have purchased from every other maker has not. I am not sure what their failure rates are these days?

I’ve broken several WD/Seagates and I’m very happy with my Lacie Porsche 4tb usb-c drive. I’ve tried also these WiFi drives and have to give them back right after trying to load some data into these.