LaCie 1big Dock SSD Pro field test
#review #hardware #proaudio #provideo
It’s all in the name, but still, I think this one needs a little explaining:
LaCie is the premium brand of Seagate (since 2014), creating storage solutions
1big stands for bigger size than the portable ones, containing 1 drive
it’s also a docking station
the drive used is a SSD
it’s created for you, the audio- or video professional
Size matters
So this one is from what LaCie calls the ‘1big’ line-up. Compared to a small portable SSD drive, this has a bigger enclosure, but it’s still not bigger than 8,5 x 4,6 x 2,5 inches and it weighs 1.3 kgs (without the separate power supply). Storage wise it comes in two sizes, 2TB and 4TB, quite small for an enclosure this size. That’s because there is an extremely fast and expensive NMVe SSD drive in here. It’s actually quite small, not bigger than a flat candy bar, but surrounded by a giant heat sink. You can easily remove the whole thing. The front opens up like a small door and pushes this heatsink out of the enclosure. In theory you could swap it with another unit. That would make sense. You could have all kinds of projects on different drives. Why else would they make it so easy to remove the disk? Well, I asked LaCie and they couldn’t tell me why. So no separate drives are available.
The need for speed
Besides this heatsink, LaCie also added a small fan in the back, to get rid of the heat build up in the enclosure. So where is all this heat coming from, you might ask. Good question, because most SSDs come in these small enclosures and don’t have this heat build up. That’s because they aren’t as fast as this baby, they normally have speeds like 500 MB/s for reading and writing, like the Samsung T5 (which I love to use by the way). With the 1big Dock SSD Pro, I tested writing speeds of 2 GB/s and reading speeds around 2,4 GB/s. Crazy stuff and even faster than my internal Mac SSD. Have a look at the test results with this nice free app by Blackmagicdesign.
In theory you could work on some 6K or 8K uncompressed video or record over 6600 tracks of audio at 96 kHz 24 bit or playback 7850 tracks. I don’t feel the need to do that, but you could (if your processor could handle it). In practice I tried many things like playback of uncompressed 4K video with lots of audio tracks and had really no problems at all. You just need a Thunderbolt 3 connection, the right cable (a short one is included) and you’re good to go. A longer cable would be nice, but those are extremely expensive. So it will always have to be near your computer.
There’s more
Besides hard drive, it has a couple more tricks under its sleeve. On the front panel, you can find lots of connection options to transfer your media files: a USB hub, SD, CFast 2.0, and CFexpress card slots. On the back you’ll find a DisplayPort 1.4 video output for 4K monitors and two Thunderbolt 3 ports. It’s a nice extra, but don’t expect too much out of it. If you connect this to your MacBook Pro to have a DisplayPort output, sure, it works. But it doesn’t mean you’ll get extra graphic power like you’ll get with an eGPU. Also, the charging part is a bit disappointing. You can use the USB port for charging, but the power supply doesn’t replace the one of your MacBook Pro, it can’t handle more than 45 Watts.
Buy or don’t buy?
In the end, these extra connections come in handy, but it’s the speed and reliability what we are looking for in a professional environment. The speed is no problem, it’s the fastest drive out there. Reliability is also ok. I am using it for a couple of months now and it never failed on me. Only a few times it didn’t come out of it’s sleep mode, but a hard reset did the trick. For the rest, no issues. So as a stationary drive, it is doing fine and I don’t have any complaints of fan noise or too much heat. The only complaint I have is the price. The 2TB costs $1349 and the 4TB costs $2599. That’s a lot of money for a drive, even with these specs. Now if they only had these disks with the heatsink available separately, like you see here below, that could make it more interesting and would make it also more portable. Like an Iomega zipdrive on steroids.
