LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 3 10TB external drive Review

Rating: 8.0.

LaCie's external storage drives have been around for quite some while – since the Speed 2 in the late nineties.  Sitting under the company's professional banner, the d2 Thunderbolt 3 drive is the latest D2 family member of Neil Poulton designed external hard drives. The flagship of the range is the massive 10TB model we are looking at today.

The LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 3 range currently consists of three capacities; 6TB (STFY6000400), 8TB (STFY8000400) and the flagship 10TB (STFY10000400) drive.  All three drives use Seagate BarraCuda Pro conventional hard drives, the first LaCie products to support these drives. Seagate's BarraCuda Pro drives have a spin speed of 7,200rpm and a 256MB cache. LaCie quote a transfer rate for the drive of up to 240MB/s.

The drives come with a pair of Thunderbolt 3 40Gbps ports and single USB 3.1 Gen.1 type C port. The USB port can also be used as a 15W charger.

LaCie back the drive with a very decent 5-year warranty.

Physical Specifications:
Usable Capacities: 6TB, 8TB, 10TB
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda Pro
Spin Speed: 7,200rpm
Interface (s):  2 x Thunderbolt 3, 1 x USB 3.1 Gen.1 Type C
Form Factor: External
Dimensions: 217 x 130 x 60mm
Drive Weight: 2.2kg

Firmware Version: SC60

 
The d2 Thunderbolt 3 comes in a biggish box with a good clear image of the drive on the front of it. On the top right-hand side is a panel displaying the drives capacity, spin speed, maximum transfer rate and the fact it's an enterprise class drive.

The rear of the box has an image of how the drive can be used with a laptop with a multilingual description of Thunderbird 3 transfer speeds.  Below the image are three icons showing Thunderbolt Daisy Chaining, USB-C connectivity and USB 3.0 compatibility.

Under each there are more multilingual descriptions. On the top flap of the box is a full-size image of the front of the drive.

 
One side of the box has an image of the rear of the drive showing all the various ports and an acknowledgement that is has been designed by Neil Poulton. The other side panel has a feature table, a small specifications table and lists of system requirements, software and what's in the box.

The outside of the accessory box has an illustrated quick start guide showing how the d2 drive can be connected while inside the box there seems to be every mains connector known to man to connect to the 60W power adapter to any national grid, a USB-C cable and finally a Thunderbolt cable.

The build quality of the d2 Thunderbolt 3 is very good. The enclosure has been constructed from one single sheet of aluminium, which acts like a heat sink, helping the pull away heat from the vertically mounted hard drive. The base is covered in small rubber feet to lessen any effect of drive vibration.

The front of the unit is dominated by the large blue drive activity light looking for all the world like a miniature version of SAL from 2010 A Space Odyssey. At the top of the rear panel is the grill for the Delta ASB02512HA fan. This 25mm sleeve bearing fan is rated at 1,500rpm, shifting 4.21CFM with a noise level between 31-35dBA. Normally a fan this small would be a noisy little devil but this one is very quiet.

Sitting under the fan are three vertically mounted ports; single USB 3.1 Gen.1 type C and two Thunderbolt 3. Under these sit a Kensington Lock Slot and the power port. Finally, at the base of the rear panel there is a built-in cable tidy.

LaCie's Setup Assistant utility comes pre-loaded on the drive. With it,  you can partition the drive to be used by a Windows or Mac system or even make two partitions to accommodate both systems. Also bundled on the drive are a direct link to download Adobe Reader and LaCie's own Genie Timeline backup software.

To test the drive we formatted it using the NTFS file system and tested it using the USB3.1 Type-C port.

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.3.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.

Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.

LaCie quote a transfer rate of up to 240MB/s for the d2 Thunderbolt 3 which we were able to confirm with the ATTO benchmark. Under benchmarking the drive produced a read score of 241MB/s with writes coming in at 236MB/s. The drive's write performance when dealing with 4K data is markedly better than the read.

IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.

We set IOmeter up (as shown above) to test both backup and restore performance on a 100GB file.

The d2 Thunderbolt 3 had no problems with our backup and restore tests, performing both at over 200MB/s.

To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of the drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.

60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files.
50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files).
10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of .png, raw and .jpeg images).
10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files).

The only times the drive's performance dropped below 100MB/s in the real life file transfer tests were when it was writing the small bity files of the 50GB File folder and the 60GB Steam folder.

The dip in performance of writing the contents of the 50GB file folder and the 60GB Steam folder is shown up in the times both activities took to complete, the 50GB folder took ten minutes and the 60GB Steam folder ten and a half minutes.

The d2 family of external drives are available with a variety of interfaces; the d2 Thunderbolt 2 (USB3.0 &Thunderbolt 2), d2 Quadra (Firewire 800, USB3.0 & eSATA) and the d2 USB 3.0 (USB 3.0). Now, with the d2 Thunderbolt 3, Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.1 Gen.1 options are added to the list.

The Neil Poulton (multi-award winning designer) designed enclosure looks good and being constructed from a single sheet of aluminium also acts a heatsink, helping the tiny 25mm cooling fan keep the whole thing cool.

The d2 Thunderbolt 3 has three fast external connections in the shape of a pair of Thunderbolt 3 ports and USB3.1 Gen.1 type C port, but its all a bit academic when the data comes streaming down the pipe only to hit the brick wall that is a conventional mechanical drive. Having said that, the performance is very good for an HDD-based external drive. LaCie quote a transfer rate of up to 240MB/s which we could confirm with the ATTO benchmark, the review drive producing a read figure of 241MB/s and 236MB/s for writes. It was also very quick when dealing with the large files of our 12GB Movie folder, writing the files to the drive in 56.9 seconds (221MB/s) and reading them back in 55.2 seconds (228MB/s).

While having 10TB of storage in a drive you can carry about (bearing in mind it weighs 2.2Kg) is very impressive we can't help feeling that if you need this much storage space just sitting on your desk, maybe it's time to look at getting some sort of NAS device.

We found the 10TB d2 Thunderbolt 3 drive for £579.60 (inc VAT) at Span.com HERE

Pros

• Huge capacity.
• Thunderbolt 3 & USB 3.1 connections.
• Warranty length.
• USB charging.

Cons

• Having an HDD drive doesn't make the most of the interfaces on offer.
• Pricey.

Kitguru says:  Massive capacity for an external drive and despite the mechanical drive inside, reasonably fast too.

Become a Patron!