It’s always a little painful when Apple decide to transition to a new set of connectors. This time it’s the Macbook Pro that’s leading the charge, having ditched any connectors that aren’t Thunderbolt 3. Cupertino will gladly sell you a dongle to help ease the transition…
Apple’s fastest growing product category. pic.twitter.com/d1sel4N5Yc
— Drew Breunig (@dbreunig) October 28, 2016
…but if you want to take advantage of the huge increase in bandwidth the standard makes available, it’s time for some new drives.
We’ve already covered G-Tech’s initial offerings, and now Lacie have announced their first drives that connect via Thunderbolt 3.
![The Bolt3. It's fast. Really, really fast. And expensive. Really, really expensive.](https://www.newsshooter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/bolt-3-front-400x400.jpg)
If speed is your thing, the Bolt3 is the company’s self-proclaimed ‘world’s fastest desktop drive.’ Inside a typically sleek , CNC machined aluminium enclosure are two M.2 PCIe SSDs that are striped in a RAID for speed – up to 2800MB/s of speed. That’s pretty fast, though still only using just over half the theoretical bandwidth of the Thunderbolt 3 standard.
![Two Thunderbolt 3 ports and a power jack. It's all aluminium but sadly there's also a tiny fan in there to help with cooling. No silent desktop for you, Speedy Gonzales.](https://www.newsshooter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/bolt-3-back-400x400-e1477993391382.jpg)
If capacity is more useful to you, the company has updated its 12big line of traditional spinning platter RAIDs and introduced a new six disk array, known as the 6big. The 12big will manage speeds of up to 2600MB/s and the 6big 1400MB/s, depending on how they’re configured: those headline rates are for RAID 0, which offers no redundancy at all and is perhaps not the best or safest way to make use of all that space.
![This is a tall picture of a tall product. Room for 12 drives, four fans and it will daisychain your Thunderbolt 3 signal to two 4K monitors.](https://www.newsshooter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/LaCie_12big-Right-Bird-Eye_400x400.jpg)
A more sensible use for a maxed out 120TB 12big would be to take a slight hit on speed and store 100 hours of 4K ProRes 4444 XQ footage in RAID 5 (assuming 764GB/hour of footage). Drives are user-serviceable and the housings are metal to help dissipate the heat all those spinning disks will generate while you’re cutting the next generation of cat videos in 8K.
![The 6big. Six drives, still fast.](https://www.newsshooter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/LaCie_6big-Right-Bird-Eye_400x400.jpg)
And if you need the capacity of a RAID on location, Lacie have partnered with Peli to offer custom Storm cases for both the 12big and 6big arrays. These are waterproof, dustproof, airtight and come with a lifetime warranty from Pelican: they sound like a great option if you just can’t bear to leave your RAID in the edit suite.
It’s great to see mass market post-production tools start to catch up with the demands of 4K footage and there’s no doubt the Thunderbolt 3 specs are a huge leap forward when compared to Thunderbolt 2.
![The 12bigs footprint is small enough to use on a desktop. Ear defenders not included.](https://www.newsshooter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/LaCie-12big-Environmenta_400x400.jpg)
Of course it’s early days for the new standard and early adoption comes at a price. If you’re currently pricing up your new editing setup… you might want to have a little sit down. The superfast Bolt3 comes in a 2TB SSD capacity for $1,999 US (yes, nearly what you just spent on your new Macbook Pro), the 6big will be available in 24TB, 36TB, 48TB and 60TB capacities starting at $3,199 US, and the LaCie 12big will come in 48TB, 72TB, 96TB and 120TB capacities starting at $6,399 US. Peli cases for the RAIDs will start at a more wallet-friendly $349, and everything will be available ‘this quarter’ from resellers. Time to start writing those letters to Father Christmas…