This drive marries five hard disks in a 20TB volume, which, thanks to the capabilities of Thunderbolt, work together at wildly fast speeds. In tests with very small files, the drive performs about as well as Western Digital’s two-disk, 10,000rpm My Book Velociraptor Duo (4 stars, Jan/13, p64). With larger data, the 5big streaks ahead to peaks of 777.7MB and 634.9MB per second in sequentialread and -write tests. The first figure is near LaCie’s quoted 785MB/s, although the second is further below the expected 695MB/s.
Hard disk performances fluctuate, but the 5big’s average read and write speeds of 569.1MB/s and 490.1MB/s remain respectable.
In the tougher random-read and -write tests, we observed average read and write speeds of 367.8MB/s and 348.9MB/s, respectively. These are within 20MB/s of the peak in…