LaCie Little Big Disk ThunderBolt 2 Achieves Wicked Speed With 2 x XP941 PCIe M.2 SSDs in RAID 0 – Pepcom Las Vegas 2014 Update

La Cie, a recent acquisition of our friends at Seagate, pulled off what just might be the storage highlight of CES this evening at Pepcom Las Vegas 2014.  Using, not one but, two Samsung XP941 PCIe M.2 SSDs in a RAID 0 format, they were able to achieve well over 1GB/s using their new Little Big Disk ThunderBolt 2 External Storage Device, this device connected to the Mac only by ThunderBolt 2.

La Cie With Laptop

The Little Big Disk ThunderBolt 2 is unexpectedly compact in size, able to get up to 1.4GB/s disk transfer speeds for 4K video editing and also has completely silent dual cooling for the heat created by both Samsung XP941 SSDs.

La Cie LBD2

We will be testing this unit soon enough and production and availability isn’t expected until Q3 2014.  The only performance we could confirm during this visit was that seen on the screen, with their testing through the AJA System test on a Macbook Pro as seen here:

La Cie Performance

As much as I am a bigger and better guy, there are definitely a few things that have my mind thinking on this product, the first being availability of the Samsung XP941 to Seagate/LaCie for this venture.  It is no secret to anyone that Samsung has very tight grips on the XP941 and cut availability to a trickle just after our review of the PCIe M.2 XP941 a while back, a report that remains to be a world exclusive still of that specific SSD configuration.

As well, our further testing of the XP941 in a RAID configuration demonstrated performance of over 2GB/s, as seen here, and we are wondering if we couldn’t get much closer through dual TBolt 2.0 configuration in this scenario.

RAID-XP941-ATTO

In any case, we will find out soon enough as we are working hand in hand with Seagate/LaCie on this one and should have one for testing soon enough!

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