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Lacie Thunderbolt Little Big Disk Back-up

I purchased a 2TB Lacie Thunderbolt Little Big Disk for back-ups. My first questions: I am using the app "super duper" to create a 2nd bootable drive of my mac. The speed seems almost identical(maybe just a little faster) than my Fire-wire 800 hard drive. Am I doing something wrong? I thought this Thunderbolt was supposed to be lighting fast? Copy speed is only about 50 MB/s. Please help!


2nd question: How do I partition the Lacie drive? I want to use one partition for the bootbale copy and the 2nd partition for a time machine back up. When i go into disk utility i see things that are unfamiliar to me (different from when i partition a regular external hard drvie). I see 3 icons that go like this: 1 TB Smasung HN0M101MBB Meida>Raid Slice for Lacie; Another 1 TB Smasung HN0M101MBB Meida>Raid Slice for Lacie; 2 TB Lacie>Lacie. It seemd like i cannot partition any of them based on the available options.


Please Help


Thanks!

Mac OS X (10.6.8), Mac Book Pro

Posted on Oct 7, 2011 11:47 AM

Reply
6 replies

Oct 7, 2011 1:43 PM in response to Jim George

Jim George wrote:


I thought this Thunderbolt was supposed to be lighting fast?


It is, it's just your hard drives can't keep up.



I see 3 icons that go like this: 1 TB Smasung HN0M101MBB Meida>Raid Slice for Lacie; Another 1 TB Smasung HN0M101MBB Meida>Raid Slice for Lacie; 2 TB Lacie>Lacie. It seemd like i cannot partition any of them based on the available options.


Nope, it's already a RAID 0 based in hardware, you can't partition it.



I want to use one partition for the bootbale copy and the 2nd partition for a time machine back up.


Not smart placing all your software backups in one hardware basket, and a RAID 0 on top of that.


RAID 0 is risky as the data path is split, so anything happens to any drive, all data is lost.


A drive like that is good for video files, not a bootable clone or TM drive.


https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3358920

Oct 8, 2011 3:11 AM in response to Jim George

Jim George wrote:


If my drives cannot keep up, what is the point of having thunderbolt?


Well it's like this for all new interfaces, someone has to start it and later on someone makes faster storage to take advantage of it if it's on enough machines a market develops.


Right now it's not a benefit, but perhaps later on it will if significant break throughs in storage speed occur.




If my MB Pro has thunderbolt shouldnt it be able to keep up with the speed of the external?


Thunderbolt is like a perfect straight and smooth highway with two fast lanes and no other vehicles on it, allowing for vehicles to travel at say 1000 MPH in either direction easily.


Your present storage drive in your computer and your external drive are like two horse drawn carriages on that highway. 🙂


You likely could upgrade both internal and external to SSD and it would be like a couple of tractor trailer trucks going across the highway at 100 MPH, still there is a 900 MPH more potential to go, also you need to have something in those two tractor trailers to carry in order to bother with it.


In other words, if you were constantly transferring a very huge amount of data regularly then two large 500 SSD drives would make that transfer over Thunderbolt done in a few minutes instead of a hour via horse drawn carriage.


How many times a day or a week or month or even a year do people need to transfer 500GB of data to take advantage of that extereme speed?


Anyway SSD's wear out prematurely if you do that.


So the "sense" in Thunderbolt is it doesn't make any present sense for most common storage drives, just for monitors now it appears and perhaps between two large RAID 5 sets (like 20 semi's on the highway)


Of course Apple ditched it's XRAID years ago which could have taken advantage of Thunderbolt.


I think the "sense" in Thunderbolt is more about kissing Intels arse than anything practical.


Intel controls the procesors, the integrated graphics on most Mac's, the EFI firmware and now the Thunderbolt interface between Mac's and monitors, pretty soon all that will be left of Apple is a shell name musch like it is now for Hitachi branded drives as they are now owned by Western Digitial.

Oct 10, 2011 8:04 PM in response to Jim George

*****Warning.... Proceed at your own risk!!!**************************************


Partitioning the LaCie drive is quite easy using the standard Disk Utility (using Lion). You need to think of the LaCie box as two separate drives connected by a Thunderbolt cable to your Mac. All of the Raid support for the drives is done by the Mac NOT by LaCie so you are in effect using "Soft" Raid. The only clever thing about the LaCie box is the Thunderbolt interface.


The first step is to delete the existing Raid partition (2TB Lacie) and then delete both of the "slices". You should now have 2 external 1TB drives (let's call them D1 and D2). If you like you could leave them like this but that would defeat the purpose of having the Thunderbolt connection because you don't have the throughput gain that is achievable by Raid 0 striping.


So lets say you want to create a Raid 0 Boot partition (let's call it "BOOT") that is 500GB in size and a Time Machine partition (let's call it TM) that uses the remainder ie 1500GB or 1.5TB. In Disk Utility select D1 then click on the "Partition" tab. In "Partition Layout" change "current" to "2 partitions" and enter 250GB for the size of the first partition and give it a suitable name say BOOT1. Then select the second partition (which is all the remaining space) and give it a suitable name say TM1. Then select the second disk D2 and do the same thing creating BOOT2 and TM2. Be very sure to type EXACTLY the same size for BOOT2 as you did for BOOT1. You now have all the "slices" you need to create two RAID 0 striped partitions.


Next select D1 again and click on the RAID tab. Give your new RAID set a name eg "BOOT". Select "Striped RAID Set" as the RAID type. Then click and drag the two corresponding partitions (BOOT1 and BOOT2) to the open area underneath where you selected the RAID type and low and behold you would have created a new 500GB partition called BOOT. Then select D1 again, select the RAID tab, give your second RAID set a name "TM", select "Striped RAID set" and then drag TM1 and TM2 to the area beneath to create your new 1.5TB striped partition called TM.


Of course there are other alternatives.... You could mirror the 2 drives to give you backup in the event of one of the disks failing. This would mean you would have only 1TB of useable space and would only see throughput benefits from reading rather then writing to the disks BUT you would be protected in the case of a disk failure.


Personally, I wouldn't recommend using the LaCie for important data such as standby boot drives or a Time Machine Disk. It is really only designed for applications that need to move lots of data as quickly as possible such as video editing or post production. I was quite disappointed that LaCie didn't put a hardware RAID controller in the box rather than introduce yet another point of failure by forcing you to adopt Software Raid.


Or you could do what I have done. Take an angle grinder to the box and attach two Hitachi 7K3000 3TB drives in a RAID 0 6TB array for my 4.8TB iTunes library (regularly backed up to my NAS of course) supporting 5 Apple TV's (all streaming) without missing a beat. But that would be showing off.....wouldn't it?


So in summary, the much hyped LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt edition is little more than a Thunderbolt controller, 2x 2.5" disks and with what I believe is an unnecessary fan.

Oct 11, 2011 3:52 PM in response to crhendo1

By way of an update.....


I own two Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Editions and while I have made major modifications to one of them, I decided to remove the fan from the other one to see what impact (if any) it would have on the running temperature. After running the disks flat out for 12 hours I can confirm there was only a 3% increase in temperature. Don't forget though that removing the fan will undoubtedly void your warranty.

Lacie Thunderbolt Little Big Disk Back-up

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