Regular people don't need Thunderbolt 3. It's wasted on us. We're too weak to even look at that much bandwidth. We have to turn the page quickly past the peripherals section when perusing the latest copy of MacMall, for fear of seeing something too radical. Those video professionals, however... those are some bandwidth aficionados; dog-eared copies of MacMall under their arm, always looking through their viewfinders to see if there's more MB/s off on the horizon. They want all the speeds, and all the storages.

LaCie put both speed and capacity in its new "12big" RAID, which it just announced at the video professional-centric NAB trade show. Basically, it's a huge box with 12 drive bays, huge 7200RPM Seagate drives in those bays, and a Thunderbolt 3 plug out the back. In a RAID 5 configuration (people who own video cameras know all about "RAID 5"), you get 96TB of storage and 2400MB/s transfer speeds. If you tweak the settings a bit — RAID is all about finding a balance between speed, capacity, and safety — you can go as fast as 2600MB/s. Which means, basically, you can get through a lot of 4K uncompressed footage.

Because Thunderbolt 3 is just an "Alternate Mode" for USB-C, 12big will work with that new crop of Type-C USB 3.1 devices (it even charges them over the cable), in addition to the small cadre of high-end machines with honest-to-goodness Thunderbolt 3 built in. 12big is also USB 3.0 compatible, but that's just plain boring.

LaCie will launch 12big this summer. No word on price.