So it has been awhile since I posted here, been busy working on 3 projects, one of which included one of the new “social media clauses” so it has kept me rather limited.I will post my thoughts on some of the new gear that is already shipping prior to NAB so that people can check them out at the show.

First up, LaCie’s Little Big Disc 2

I use storage from a number of manufacturers and never have I ever opened a hard drive box and recieved this level of performance with the ease and simplicity of the LBD2. LaCie has delivered the fastest single device I have ever used with my laptop.  Equipped with Intel’s Thunderbolt 2 Technology, this 1TB  sleek black box, elegantly styled and compact for it’s 1.4 pound weight, offers users the single most powerful drive I have ever used.

The Thunderbolt 2 interface in conjunction with the raided dual SSD drives inside offer users up to an astonishing 1.3 Gigabytes of data throughput per second, easily making LaCie’s LBD2 the fastest single drive publicly available. While listed price at around $1300 USD for a 1 TB volume might be cringeworthy to some, when you have the need for speed this is the drive to have.

This shows the raw speed of LaCie’s Little Big Disk 2, here showing performance  over 1 GB per second when paired  with a 2nd Gen Retina MacBook Pro with Intel’s Thunderbolt 2 technology.

The cost vs. performance is nothing short of astronomical, because we are talking about moving Gigabytes per second with this beast. That performance, equal if not better at times than the internal flash memory found in Apple’s New Mac Pro, and is unheard of outside of a incredibly small number of Post facilities or in the massive server farms that allow ITunes, Amazon and Google to spit out information to you in realtime on the web.

However for desktop users, this is a first, when built my first 1GBps array for a client in 2007, at that time it required 2 computers just to control the 72 spinning disks and cost nearly $500,000 in time and materials when finished.

I can now walk into a store and buy nearly the same throughput off the shelf and have ready to work on in mere minutes after I am out the door.

LaCie’s Little Big Disk 2 has become my main carry around work volume, I recently used it during an extended trip, where it allowed me to cut 4K ProRes 4444 content on my laptop, well away from my office, without having to work with the associated hassles of the offline / online workflow that location editing of that much content would normally require.

There is plenty more to come. Stay Tuned.