Reviews for LaCie eSATA Hub Thunderbolt Series

This is a great product. I bought it to use for editing in FCP on my iMac and with my two RAID arrays. It's been working like a charm. The speeds are great. For me it was worth every penny.

What can I say, it does exactly what Lacie says it will. I connected two esata hard drives to the Lacie hub and then from the hub to my MacBook Pro via Thunderbolt and it worked great. Plug and play, NO drivers required and very fast speeds. I was also able to daisy chain two of these devices together, since they have two thunderbolt ports, and connect three esata devices. I had two drives and a card reader, worked great.

Bought this to use with my MacBook Pro. It works great. Easy to setup. Good speeds. I use it with RAID drives via eSATA interface to store media archives. It's a great way to make the most of the Thunderbolt connection. So far I'm very pleased!

I work as a video editor and this hub is very helpful in my work. I can hook up several eSATA drives, and swap project files in no time. The transfer speeds are very good. I'd recommend this product.

It is working with a port multiplier device for me, I can see and use both drives.
I have the Thermaltake BlacX dual HD enclosure.

The LaCie hub is sturdy and nice looking, cast out of aluminum.

SATA version 2 only, so limited bandwidth for SSDs. A bit expensive.

Installs very easy, and seems stable. Haven't been able to set up a drive as a boot device, but maybe I have to try harder. It's not a deal breaker for me. "It just works."

I have no issues with this on my iMac, let's me attach and run all my eSATA HD enclosures. (not all eSATA chipsets run same speed, so don't blame this unit if not full speed, likely your enclosure)

My only minor issue is the design choice of the large light on the front.
Looks cool in the day, but for machines that run 24/7 in a bedroom (providing home sharing of media to entire house), it's not welcome.

A small pin hole activity indicator is more than enough. Not really sure why one is needed at all anyways since the HDs will have one (which are generally also too bright)

A bit pricey, $99-$149 might be closer fit IMHO.

I had to return mine. Let me qualify this by adding I own and love my two LaCie Big 2 Thunderbolt RAID devices. What I wanted to do was augment this storage with externally connected SSDs via this adapter.

I had many little, quirky issues with this device. It may be the use of SSDs in small e-SATA enclosures, but whatever it was, I experienced multiple program crashes, multiple hangs and overall it just felt marginal.

IF I had a substantial amount of money tied up in SATA devices or storage I would likely work longer and harder to stabilize the use of this device.

My biggest desire was to use my NEXTODI external CF card reader, which has USB and eSATA connections. It is great to clean off CF cards in the field shooting. This device is standard issue for press photographers. I liked the notion of draining it using eSATA. Unfortunately, this card reader/SSD did not play well with the eSATA adapter. It hung, it hung the bus and it needed the eSATA connection jiggled too often. There are a finite number of connection/disconnections of the eSATA connector before it is out of spec, as I found out. You can find the spec online, it is an eye opener.

eSATA is borderline for use externally if only because of the poor physical layer connection. I don't blame LaCie or Apple, I blame whomever designed eSATA.

So, not a good fit for me. Perhaps if things are more or less permanently jacked into this device and left on it would behave better. For frequent disconnecting it doesn't work reliably.

This is all simply my experience.

As observed by a previous review, port mult DOES work....at least with my Thermaltake BlacX eSata dual hard drive hub. Just backed up a 15gig folder from a 7200rpm drive in another esata enclosure to one of two WD Green 3tb drives in the Thermaltake in under 2 minutes. My third monitor is daisy chained. Everything PERFECT out of the box. I'm a happy camper... Lose a star though...why can't the hub be powered from the Thunderbolt bus?

My rig: 2011 iMac 3.4ghz 27", 32 gig RAM, Focusrite Saffire 56 audio interface (FW400)

I'm very glad I got this hub. Plenty of times I found myself in need of transferring files from my eSata drives to my iMac, and this hub took care of that remarkably well. Way faster than USB. Awesome!

Excellent product. Works well, and allows some really fast transfer speeds. I use it with my three drives (two eSATA and one Thunderbolt) and a MacbookPro. It really helps to improve the workflow and get things done faster.