Best Prices Today: LaCie 8Big Pro5 RAID box (32TB)

SSDs are expensive–hard drives, not as much so. Hence, when huge amounts of capacity are required, hard drives, albeit slower, can be a superior economic solution.

Enter the handsome LaCie 8Big Pro5 (5 as in Thunderbolt 5) with its eight drive bays and hardware RAID implementation. It offers SSD-like performance with sequential transfers; it’s available with up to 256TB of capacity; features brick outhouse construction, and it comes with an outstanding warranty. What’s not to love? (Outside of the price, perhaps.)

LaCie 8Big Pro5’s features

The Thunderbolt 5 8Big Pro5 is rather large at 11.7-inches wide, by 9.1-inches deep, by 8.25 inches tall (approximate) and heavy, weighing 32 pounds with eight hard drives installed. It has eight vertically-oriented, front-accessible, easy-open, non-locking drive bays with non-tool trays on the front. Swapping out drives doesn’t get any easier.

The 8Big Pro5 features Neil Poulon styling with the familiar blue power button, which is a tad smaller than some in the past. It’s not quite the conversation-starter the older Bigs were, but it’s still a very attractive product.

Shape consciousness aside, the 8Big Pro5 features hardware RAID, offloading those duties from the operating system. It does however, require a driver for the operating system to recognize it.

Note that LaCie talks about the 120Gbps of bandwidth, but that’s only for downstream video, as in an attached 8K display. Thunderbolt 5 limits storage and other peripherals to 80GBps

RAID 0/1/5/6/10/50/60, JBOD, as well as multi-RAID setups are supported by the 8Big Pro5. Usable capacity will vary according to the RAID mode you use. Only RAID 0 striping will give you the full advertised amount of storage (as well as the best speed), but it lacks redundancy and should never be used unless backed up regularly.

The rear panel of the 8Big Pro5 is festooned with three Thunderbolt 5 ports (one for your computer, two downstream), and most unusually, a Type-C USB 20Gbps port. Most units opt for 10Gbps USB, because…

…said 20Gbps USB port is 3.2×2, not USB4 and will fall back to 10Gbps on most systems. It is possible to employ the USB 3.2×2 protocol over Thunderbolt, but so far we’ve yet to see it. USB 3.2×2 drops to the fastest USB 3.2 rate supported by the host computer, and in the Mac’s case, that’s 10Gbps.

The rear of the 8Big Pro5 also sports a Kensington lock port and the three-prong jack for the very thick, heavy-duty power cord (Nice!). There are actually four cords for the various international standards. This may somehow save Seagate/LaCie money, but most users will toss three, and they’ll wind up in a landfill. Ugh.

There is DRAM cache on board the 8Big Pro5, but LaCie/Seagate weren’t forthcoming on how much. I’m guessing one or two gigabytes, given that the performance we saw with smaller data sets dropped off significantly when the test data set size increased.

LaCie offers its colorful, efficient, and easy RAID Manager software for both macOS and Windows. In fact — it’s required, as it also installs the driver that allows your system to recognize the unit. The software lets you check status and change RAID modes.

Changing RAID mode can be a very lengthy process depending on what mode you’re switching to/from. It took the better part of two days to switch back to the default RAID 5 after I tried RAID 0. You can use the 8Big Pro5 during this process, but performance will suffer a bit.

One caveat concerning the 8Big Pro5 under Windows: you must log on locally for it to be recognized by Windows. I normally use the Windows App on my Mac to access the various test beds (I ran PCWorld’s tests on the unit as well) remotely.

In this case, however, remote login resulted in a Kernel DMA code 55 with the enclosure listed as blocked. Once I logged on locally, I was then able to log on remotely. Go figure.

LaCie (Seagate really) offers a whopping 5-year warranty that includes data recovery on the 8Big Pro5. That should go a long way to alleviate any trepidation concerning hard drive longevity.

LaCie 8Big Pro5 prices

At the minimum 32TB (eight 4TB HDDs) capacity, the 8Big Pro5 costs a rather hefty $5,979/£5,419. or $186/£169 per terabyte. With 64TB, it’s $7,249/£6,559 ($113/£102 per terabyte), with 128TB it’s $8,969/£9,218 ($70/£72 per terabyte), and with 192TB we’re talking $11,269/£11,596 ($59/£60 per terabyte). There’s also the 256TB version that I tested (it was a hoot!) that was listed on B&H for $14,259.00 ($56 per terabyte) and £14,712 (£57 per terabyte) on Seagate.

The 32TB 8Big Pro5’s price per terabyte is a tad disappointing. 8TB NVMe SSDs run around $1,300 at the moment, so a far faster four-disk, 32TB NVMe array would be actually be less per terabyte than the 8Big Pro5.

Multiply the $5,400 32TB SSD RAID price by larger capacities, however, (e.g., 64TB/$10,800, 128TB/$21,600, etc.), and solid state arrays get prohibitively expensive in a hurry. Once you get into larger capacities, the fiscal math starts to work more and more in the 8Big Pro5’s favor and then some.

However, keep in mind that hard drives are inherently less reliable than SSDs, though far less troublesome than they were a decade or so ago. As to that, I’ve had two hard drive arrays running in NAS boxes since 2019 with no failures. Running in mirrored RAID 1 for safety though, I must confess.

LaCie 8Big Pro5 performance

How fast the 8Big Pro5 is depends on the RAID mode you run it in and how much data you throw at it. The 256TB unit with eight 32TB Ironwolf Pro hard drives was at its absolute fastest over Thunderbolt 5 with relatively small amounts of data (a few gigabytes). With the 1GiB data set under RAID 5, it can reach 7GBps reading/2.2GBps writing according to AmorphousDiskMark. In RAID 0 make that 6GBps reading and 3.3GBps writing.

Despite the fantastic read number with the 1GiB data set, you should generally expect sequential write performance around 2GBps with the 8Big Pro5. Likewise, 4K performance is excellent with small data sets thanks to the DRAM cache, but becomes strictly hard drive-like once you run out of cache. See the second image below.

You do get the gaudy 7GBps reads when you use these smaller data sets with AmorphousDiskMark on the 8Big Pro5, as you can see above.

Performance mellows out to 1.8GBps reading and 2.25GBps writing sequential data, and strictly hard drive like random performance 16/11MBps random ops when you bump up the size of the data set to 64GiB. This is more indicative of what you’ll see if you bang hard on the drive with large amounts of data.

Just to show the improvement in write speed in RAID 0, here is the AmorphousDiskMark 1GiB 0 test. However, we do not recommend RAID 0 for any RAID device if there’s anything irreplaceable on board that isn’t being backed up regularly.

Disk Speed Test and ATTO weren’t quite as glowing as AmorphousDiskMark with their reports, largely because the data they employ likely exceeds the amount of DRAM cache. However, they represent the overall performance you can expect from the 8Big Pro5

ATTO rated the 8Big Pro5 as a poor reader with larger data sets. We, and the other benchmarks don’t agree. Why the anomaly we can’t say.

I also ran the 8BIg Pro5 through sister publication PCWorld’s test suite, largely for the real world transfer tests, though we don’t have any other 256TB RAID boxes to compare the LaCie to directly. The story was nearly identical to what you see above (ATTO excluded).

Our test 8Big Pro5 proved easily fast enough for professional workloads, and the lesser capacity models should perform largely the same given what we know about the hard drives included.

Should you buy the LaCie 8Big Pro5?

I found the 8Big Pro5 an extremely impressive bit of kit: SSD-fast, very vast, and yes, good-looking. However, it only makes financial sense if you opt for 64TB or more, with 128GB looking like the sweet spot. Go big or go home, as it were. If your storage needs aren’t that great, explore other options such as the OWC 4M2, Terramaster D4 SSD, or take a look at our NAS best picks.