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LaCie 6big Thunderbolt 3 is a product that meets the expectations of very high-end professional users, for whom the needs are very specific and the idea of a compromise quite far away.
And indeed the weapons of the 6big Thunderbolt 3 are very sharp: 6 bays for 3.5 “disks, in original box with Seagate Enterprise-grade disks, various RAID configurations for striping , mirroring and redundancy, two Thunderbolt 3 (which can become Thunderbolt 2 with one adapter) and USB-C (which can become USB 3 Type A with another adapter).
On balance, basically one of the fastest and most capacious local disks in the market, if not the fastest, which could be exceeded in speed if SSD drives are inserted instead of mechanical disks, but with a decidedly different capacity and price.
The model we tested, with the latest 15 “MacBook Pro and the latest 27” iMac (both with Thunderbolt 3) was configured with 6 6TB drives: we easily configured it to RAID 5, resulting in a single 30TB volume with 6TB redundancy, which seemed to us the best compromise between speed and security, but that can go up to 36 TB using a RAID 0.
6big Thunderbolt 3, the style LaCie can be seen and heard
The LaCie style, which has always made school in the world of consumer and professional storage systems, here does not disappoint and indeed broadens horizons while maintaining a solid identity.
So solid that the branding appears nowhere but behind, just above the power connector: LaCie is confident that the shape and the iconic blue light are an element recognizable as much as the brand.
Frontally there are the 6 bays, placed in vertical position, each one with a door and a dedicated bed in order to be checked and replaced individually mind. The blue LED light serves both as identification of the operation and as a way to put the disk in Stand-by.
A detail of the available ports, two Thunderbolt 3 and a USB-C
The disc beds open with a slight pressure, it is not necessary to use any special tools.
On the back there are two Thunderbolt 3 connectors for connection in cascade and a USB-C connector (useful for example for MacBooks), which with some adapters are also valid for older Macs that do not yet have these standards.
Always at the inside the package there are the power cable and two communication cables, one USB-C and one Thunderbolt 3, which unfortunately are very similar (it would have been better to have them in two different colors, for example).
The two cables available: it was better to insert different colors 
Ignition (via power supply and a hardware click on the back) shows the switching on of the front blue LED light, and the start of the six discs that does not go unnoticed: after a few seconds, however, the thing settles and the noise is very low (considering six discs that run), practically non-existent considering the professional environment for which it is intended.
The RAID in the head
Using the RAID manager software, which can be downloaded for free from the LaCie website, we can configure the disk as best we want: the software is done well, the six disks are presented graphically as well as the RAID levels, and we can always have in view both the final result in terms of space and the redundancy obtained (for safety).
The software is interesting also to understand what the disk is doing: there is a kind of Log function for the most important events and obviously a handout to understand the status of all the disks, one by one.
The software to manage the various RAID levels
The fact that it is graphically rendered is not it means that it is designed for the consumer user, because such a machine will become a consumer in ten years, but that even professionals not accustomed to the IT world can still manage themselves both the maintenance and the management of space.
The speed detected is very good, probably second only to SSD drives (which we remember, they offer significantly less space at much higher costs): of the Seagate Enterprise internal drives we appreciated the silence, not due to this category, and above all the lack of excessive vibration, because placed on the same table as a MacBook Pro the disk was like not having it (even if such a disk in a table is difficult to miss).
Conclusions
To such a product, with very few market competitors in the same ago wake it is difficult to make an assessment: in practice, if you work with 4K video streams or if you are professional photographers and have a fairly full-bodied RAW stream, if you do 3D rendering or in general if you need a lot, a lot of space at maximum speed there is no there are many alternatives to however that of LaCie is absolutely level.
In Italy the product is distributed by Attiva, and it is possible to buy it with various configurations, starting from 24 TB up to 60 TB total : some configurations, however, can also be found online.
Pro :
Against:
Price : 3.849,00 Euro (the model tested by us, 36TB)
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