LaCie shipped the 8big Rack Thunderbolt 2 storage system originally announced at NAB. Using eight of Seagate's new 6 TB hard disks, the system provides up to 48 TB of storage capacity at speeds of up to 1330 MB/sec over one Thunderbolt cable in a single rack unit, the company said.

The 8big Rack is being positioned as an alternative to 8 Gb fibre-channel DAS systems. LaCie says it supports raw 4K real-time workflows in Apple Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere. And because the systems can be daisy-chained, LaCie said, a new Mac Pro with its six Thunderbolt 2 ports could hook up to 36 8big Racks for 1.7 PB of storage capacity and bandwidth of 3000 MB/sec.

RAID 5 and 6 are supported in hardware, and the eight-disk configurations ship with two hot-swappable power supplies for complete hardware redundancy. 

The system is now available in configurations including 12 TB ($1700), 24 TB ($2800) and 48 TB ($5000). The 12 TB four-disk version ships with a single power supply, but a second one can be added for $279, and spare 6 TB hard disks can be had for $499.