LaCie 2big Dock Thunderbolt 3 Review

The 2big Dock Thunderbolt 3 is part of LaCie's Professional range of external storage drives. Available in capacities up to 20TB, it's equipped with a pair of Thunderbolt 3 ports for fast data transfers and comes with SD and CF Flash card slots. Designed by multi award-winning product designer Neil Poulton, the 2big Dock Thunderbolt 3 has aluminium enclosure to help with getting rid of the heat generated by two fast spinning hard drives. Also helping to keep the unit cool is a whisper quiet fan. The 2big Dock Thunderbolt 3 currently comes in four capacities; 8TB, 12TB, 16TB and the flagship 20TB unit that LaCie supplied for review. LaCie's drive of choice for the range are Seagate IronWolf Pro enterprise-class hard drives which have spin speeds of 7,200 rpm and 256MB of cache. Built into the front of the unit are CF and SD card slots. LaCie back the 2big Dock Thunderbolt 3 with a 5-year warranty. Physical Specifications: Usable Capacities: 8TB, 12TB, 16TB, 20TB Hard Drive: Seagate IronWolf Pro Hard Drive Spin Speed: 7,200rpm Hard Drive Cache: 256MB RAID Supported: RAID 0/1/JBOD Interface: 2 x Thunderbolt 3, 1 x USB 3.1 Type-C, 1 x DisplayPort. Rear Ports: 2 x Thunderbolt 3, 1 x USB 3.1 Type-C, 1 x DisplayPort. Front Ports: 1 x USB 3.0, 1 x CF card slot, 1 x SD card slot. Form Factor: External Dimensions: 217 x 118 x 93.3mm Drive Weight: 2.9g Hard Drive Firmware Version: EN01 The box front has a very large, clear image of the unit along with a small panel in the top right hand corner which shows the units capacity, stated transfer speed, hard disk speed and the fact they are enterprise class drives. The rear of the box has a image of the rear of the unit and a 3/4 view of the front with all the relevant features clearly labelled. There are also three multilingual displays showing various aspects of how the drive can be used; Docking points to connect peripherals, Dual Thunderbolt 3 ports for 5K workflows and USB 3.0 compatibility for PCs and Macs. One side of the box has a full sized image of the front of the unit, while the other side has a comprehensive feature panel, a specification panel and lists of box contents, downloadable software options and system requirements. The front of the unit is basically made up by the two drive doors, the top one of which has the usual LaCie Blue LED indicator 'orb' which turns from its usual Blue to Red if any drastic happens to the system. Under the drive doors is a single USB 3.0 port along with CompactFlash and SecureDigital slots. The rear panel is dominated by the grill for the cooling fan. The choice of fan for the 2big Dock is an interesting one as it's not from the usual suspects of fan manufacturers you normally find in these type of devices. LaCie have chosen a Noctua fan for the 2big Dock and not just any old Noctua fan but one of their special quiet fans; a 60mm Noctua NF-A6x25 FLX, which uses a self-stabilising oil-pressure bearing (SSO-Bearing) with a speed rating of between 1,600rpm and 3,000rpm. The sound level for this fan ranges from 8.2dB(A) to 19.3 dB(A). To the left of the grill is the power button which also doubles up as a confirmation button for RAID configurations. The problem with this idea is that having a semi recessed button is fine if the unit is on a desk, but if its sitting on a shelf and you have to fumble around trying to find it you will end up cursing the designer especially as if you are using it as the RAID confirmation button as the RAID Manager software doesn't give you that much time to confirm any changes. But to be fair to LaCie you not going to be swapping RAID types around too often in everyday situations. Sitting under the grill are the power input port, the two Thunderbolt 3 ports, a USB 3.1 Type-C port and a DisplayPort. Positioned between the Thunderbolt and USB ports is a firmware update button that only works for USB firmware updates. The drive doors have Blue indicator LEDS built into the side of them and the drive bays support hot swapping of drives. The 20TB version of the 2Big Dock comes with two Seagate IronWolf Pro hard drives installed. These are 7 platter (disc) designs with a 7,200rpm spin speed and 256MB of cache. As usual with a LaCie drive, the box bundle contains most of the power leads known to man. Along with these are an 84W power adapter (Hoioto ADS-110DL-12-1), Thunderbolt 3 cable (which is rather short), a USB Type-C to Type-A cable and a manual. Like the LaCie 12big we looked at recently, the 2big Dock uses LaCie's excellent RAID Manager software but obviously a cut down version as there are only two disks to play with. Setting up the array is a doddle thanks to RAID Mangers use of graphics on the Choose RAID Level page. You simply click on the disk icons to select them and choose which type of RAID (RAID 0 or 1) you want to setup. It also displays how much of drives capacity will be used, in the case of RAID 1, for Mirroring and Parity duties. Once you have selected which RAID version you want, oddly you have to press the power button in the rear panel to create the array. The Array tab, as its says on the tin, displays details of the array that has been set up and its status. The Updates page displays RAID Manager and System Firmware versions and also gives the opportunity to check for any updates for them. Also available to download from the LaCie website are a couple of backup managers; Genie Backup Manager Pro for Windows systems and Intego Backup Manager Pro for Macs. Out of the box the unit is preconfigured as an HFS+ RAID 0 array. We reformatted it in NTFS and tested both RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurations. For the Thunderbolt 3 interface we used an Asus Thunderbolt EX3 add-in card. Thanks to Asus for their support with this. You can see more information on this card on the ASUS site, over HERE. Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.3. The write performance of the 2big Dock Thunderbolt 3 is far superior to the reads in both arrays when it comes to dealing with 4K file sizes. The read performance does pick up significantly at a deeper queue depth when in a RAID 1 array using the Thunderbolt 3 interface. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. LaCie quote a official maximum transfer rate for the 2big Dock of 440MB/s when using a Thunderbolt 3 connection, which we able to confirm and indeed better with the ATTO benchmark. The review unit producing read/write scores of 465MB/s and 463MB/s respectively. IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology. We set IOmeter up (as shown above) to test both backup and restore performance on a 100GB file. The 2big Dock had no problems dealing with backing and restoring the 100GB file test file, writing to the drive at 464MB/s and reading the data back at 459MB/s using the Thunderbolt 3 interface with the disks in a RAID 0 array. Peak throughput for the drive when using Thunderbolt 3 comes when it is in a RAID 0 array at the 2MB block size when the drive hits 441.39MB/s before falling back before hitting 411.43MB/s at the end of the test. Peak read performance in RAID 1 was at the 8MB block size with the drive reaching 222.91MB/s. When it came to write throughput, the best the drive could manage was is in RAID 0 at a 512KB block size where it reached 408.58MB/s. Peak write performance when the drives were in a RAID 1 array was 222.04MB/s (8MB block size). To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO. 100GB data file 60GB iso image 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files. 50GB File folder – 28,523 files. 12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files). 10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of .png, raw and .jpeg images). 10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files). 5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo The 2big Dock dealt with our real life test file transfers without any problems, showing strong performance throughout the tests. LaCie's 2big Dock Thunderbolt 3, designed by Neil Poulton, is the latest addition to the company's professional product line. A two disk external drive, it offers fast transfer speeds courtesy of its Thunderbolt 3 interfaces; there's two of them, and there's also a USB 3.1 Type-C port as well. It comes in 8TB, 12TB, 16TB and 20TB capacities using Seagate's IronWolf Pro enterprise-class hard drives. Actually just calling the 2big Dock Thunderbolt 3 just an external drive does it a disservice as it also has a DisplayPort to connect to hi-res displays and a pair of card slots (SD and CF) to directly off load files from. You can also charge your phone via the front USB 3.0 port or connect a camera direct to the 2big Dock. When in RAID 0 mode and using the Thunderbolt 3 interface the 2big Dock is fast, Lacie claim a maximum transfer speed of 440MB/s but we managed a shade more with read/write scores of 465MB/s and 463MB/s respectively. Obviously to get the most out of the bandwidth offered by interface you need SSDs and it'll be interesting to see if LaCie offer an SSD version of 2Big Dock Thunderbolt 3 somewhere down the line. We found the 20TB version of the LaCie 2big Dock Thunderbird 3 for £1,038.00 (inc VAT) on Span.com HERE Discuss on our Facebook page, over HERE Pros. Capacity. Compact design. Interface options. RAID Manager software. 5-year warranty. Cons. Pricey. Having to use the power button on the rear panel for RAID change confirmation. Really needs SSD's to get the best of the Thunderbolt 3 interface. Kitguru says: LaCie's 2big Dock Thunderbolt 3 is aimed at the professional user combining very large capacity with a fast interface, just right for shifting large image files around and in that context the DisplayPort and the ability to import images from a Flash card or directly via the camera itself are very useful added features. But it all comes at quite some cost.