External storage developer LaCie’s support for the Intel- and Apple-developed Thunderbolt connectivity standard was unwavering, so it’s no surprise to see the company debuting multiple early Thunderbolt 2 solutions. In addition to faster versions of its prior 2big and 5big desktop hard drive systems, LaCie has announced 8big Rack Thunderbolt 2 ($TBD)—a rack-mounted multi-drive solution with your choice of 12TB, 24TB, or 48TB of capacity.
While it’s not as fancy on the outside as LaCie’s other storage solutions, the box opens to reveal eight hard drive bays that can be loaded up with 3TB or 6TB Seagate 7200RPM drives, run in tandem for high-speed video editing and storage.
As a 1U rack-mounted box with a ton of storage, 8big Rack is the sort of hard drive solution professional video renderers and editors would use for feature-length films—LaCie notes that it’s ideal for RAW files in Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere, and capable of 1330 Megabyte/second transfer speeds, fast enough for 4K video editing.
Two Thunderbolt 2 ports are on the box, which has completely redundant fans and power supplies, as well as hot-swappable drives and hardware RAID 5/6 support built in. Pricing will be announced for the 12TB/24TB/48TB versions as soon as 8big Rack is available.
