LaCie 8Big Pro5 review: Gargantuan capacity and Thunderbolt 5 speed

SSD’s are expensive.

What are the 8Big Pro5’s features?

To be honest, I miss the old silver drawers and huge blue power button of older LaCie drives. Neil Poulon still does a lot of LaCie’s styling but there was no claim for that as regards the 8Big Pro5. It’s good-looking to be sure, and there is a blue button (much smaller) — it’s just not the conversation starter the old Bigs were.

How much does the 8Big Pro5 cost?

As configured with 32TB (eight 4TB HDDs), the 8Big Pro5 costs a rather hefty $5,979, or six grand in the vernacular. With 64TB, it’s $7249, with 128TB – $8969, and with 192TB – $11,269. There’s also a 256TB version listed, but it wasn’t for sale yet and no price was provided.

To be frank, the 32TB price is a bit disappointing, especially as eight 4TB Barracuda drives are only $1200. {Check when you have the box what the drives inside are} Far faster 8TB NVMe SSDs run around $1300 at the moment, so a much faster four-disk, 32TB NVMe array would be a couple hundred dollars less once you factor in an enclosure.

Note that there are external 8TB USB SSDs available for only $900 at the moment. You could combine these with software RAID for an ad hoc array, though it’s a bit of a kludge.

After you get into the larger capacities, however, the fiscal math starts to work heavily in the 8Big Pro5’s favor. Multiply the $5400 SSD price for 64TB and 128TB and your talking about thousands of dollars more for the next three tiers.

I do wish the unit was available unpopulated for those that have a surplus of HDDs sitting around, or want to use cheaper drives.

How fast is the 8Big Pro5?

How fast the 8Big Pro5 is depends on the RAID mode you run it in. At it’s absolute fastest with all eight drives striped in RAID 0, it’s around 2.8GBps. We’ve seen Thunderbolt 5 SSDs nearly touch 7GBps so it’s apparent you’re still dealing with hard drives.

Should I buy the 8Big Pro5?

In my humble opinion, the 8Big Pro5 — which admittedly is a very classy piece of storage kit — only makes financial sense at 64TB and greater capacity. The greater the capacity, the more sense it makes. At 32TB you can go cheaper and far faster. Still, kudos to Seagate for a tk.

Author: Jon L. Jacobi, Contributor, Macworld