CONCLUSION
LaCie has been the number one choice of professionals and enterprise users for many years now and every single time one of their products falls in our hands we understand why. Build quality is always excellent, design reminds us of products made by Apple (and we all know how popular those are) and performance is top of the line (unfortunately we couldn't test the D2 with a Thunderbolt 3 connection but USB 3.1 should be more than enough to max-out the performance of the Barracuda Pro 10TB drive inside). All these also apply for the new D2 Thunderbolt 3 Professional Storage Drive and on top of those you’re also getting compatibility with both PCs and MACs. We were also surprised to see that LaCie has used an inaudible 20mm fan at the rear (noise levels never went over 38dBA even when recorded from just 5cm away) to cool the Barracuda Pro 10TB drive placed inside. Of course the fan is very small so it doesn’t do such a great job but still the 48 degrees we recorded during our tests is not a bad number (based on the noise/temperature ratio). As for its features the Daisy Chaining technology can be extremely useful to professionals who need extra portable storage space or who use 4k/5k displays (unfortunately we only had 1 sample so we couldn’t test its connection to other D2’s).
LaCie products are feature-rich and combine top quality with performance thing that almost always come at an extra cost (employing famous designers for their products doesn’t really help). Because of that the new D2 Thunderbolt 3 10TB Professional Storage Drive does not come cheap and more specifically it will set you back USD599.94 inside the USA (Amazon.com) and 672Euros inside the EU (Amazon.com). Of course professionals and enterprise users who are looking for everything in an external drive including quality, performance, features and connectivity will probably not care about the price of the new D2 and since they are its main target audience it does make sense. In conclusion the D2 Thunderbolt 3 10TB Professional Storage Drive has it all, performance, quality, features and connectivity and even though it’s priced higher than what we’d hoped it’s still way too good for us to deny giving it our Platinum Award.
PROS
- Excellent Build Quality
- Design / Size
- Top of the Charts Performance
- 10TB Storage Capacity
- Daisy Chaining Technology
- Thunderbolt 3 & USB 3.1 Connectivity (Backwards Compatible)
- 5 Years Warranty
CONS
- Price (For Some)