LaCie has announced a new member to its ‘#Big’ family of professional storage and data back-up solutions. The new 2big 2-bay RAID solution is now available with Thunderbolt 3.

The new 2big Thunderbolt 3 offers increased transfer speeds with a max capacity of 20TB, but that’s not all that makes it an interesting option for the working photographer as it seems aimed to be a centralized and functioning focal point of a streamlined workflow given its myriad of ports and card slots.

On the back you’ll find a DisplayPort slot, dual Thunderbolt 3 ports which will let you power certain laptops while simultaneously daisy-chaining up to 5 additional LaCie 2big drives or other Thunderbolt™ / USB-C solutions; a USB 3.1 port (Universal compatibility with USB-C and USB 3.0 computers via the included adapter cable), and on the front can be found a USB 3.0 hub, and SD and CF card slots. All of this makes the 2big TB3 looks like a high-functioning companion to a modern photographer’s workflow, especially geared to work well with powerful modern laptops.

There are some who will argue that Thunderbolt 3 is wasted on spinning hard drives, and while we certainly wouldn’t mind seeing a variant that would take SSDs, for those who have a modern workflow with USB-C laptops and those who want to chain together a bunch of devices this is great (especially if you’re reaching or exceeding Thunderbolt 2 bandwith). The easy access card slots and ports also makes it more functional, especially given that so many laptops now (2017 MBP) are doing without card slots and all but USB-C ports.

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For those who aren’t in a TB3 environment there’s still the LaCie 2big Thunderbolt 2 that offers up to 16TB of versatile storage with speeds of up to 440MB/s and dual Thunderbolt 2 ports for 4K workflows. It’s also compatible with both PC and Mac®, thanks to USB 3.0

Hopefully, we’ll get one or both in to see how they do in a working environment.

The new Thunderbolt 3 solutions will be available come summer, but you can find the 2Big Thunderbolt stations here.