Turns out LaCie makes an excellent portable FireWire bus-powered 7200 rpm hard disk which implements a RAID 0 solution. The LaCie Little Big Disk Quadra does it all. This, my friends, is the ultimate drive for running a VM from an external drive to a MacBook Pro. It’s 7200 rpm, RAID 0, FireWire 800 and has 400 GB of total storage space. Perfect.

I’ve been working with this new MacBook Pro for about 2 months now. I ordered the latest hardware refresh the day that it was released. I’m very happy with it. This new model replaced a 2-year old model which was also the “ultimate” configuration when it was out. One of the things I noticed about the new MacBook was the much faster hard disk. You can really notice the difference when you move to 7200 rpm from 5400 rpm.

I as you can see from an earlier post, I am working on finding the best home for my VMware guest disk file on my MacBook Pro. The LaCie BigDisk Extreme+ is looking like the best choice among hard disks but I wanted to know how the LaCie compares to the internal MacBook Pro drive. I have the latest “ultimate” configuration which includes the 7200 rpm 200 GB drive. This time around, I decided to use the industry-standard Mac benchmarking program XBench.