LaCie Mobile Drive

amazon LaCie Mobile Drive reviews

A jewel in the metal case of a hard disk drive, the LaCie Mobile Drive looks great and performs well. It’s geared towards macOS users, but it should please anyone with a taste for style in their devices.

If you’re looking for a pocket-sized, super-sized memory that looks better, you’re living in the right era. Drives are inexpensive these days (cents per gigabyte), and LaCie’s release of Additional Portable Drives for Macs shows how trendy they can be, too. A sleek, sophisticated entry in the storage sweepstakes, this minimalist portable drive is compatible with USB Type-A or Type-C ports and comes in capacities from 1TB to 5TB. You can cram thousands of audio, image, or video files into even the smallest files; The 2TB (Mac-friendly Space Gray) model we’re looking at here costs $94.95 through Apple’s online store. More colors are coming to Amazon and other retailers soon. It’s a winner and matches any Apple laptop, as well as any sleek silver ultraportable.

Metal makes everything better.

These days, it’s hard for external hard drive manufacturers to differentiate their products. Most performance and cost are the same at a given capacity. After all, they all do the same job. So, in a commodity niche, how does your device stand out from the competition? The answer is designed. The performance and price numbers may be similar, but they don’t have to be the same.

LaCie’s portable drive doesn’t look like the other guy’s portable drive. It’s a 2.5-inch, 5,400-rpm drive housed in a solid aluminum plate. It is a smooth 4.8 x 3.5-inch wedge that lies flat and is 0.39 inches thick. Unlike the rough, fabric-covered Backup Plus Ultra Touch from LaCie’s parent company, Seagate, the entire body of the Mobile Drive is made of metal with thin beveled edges. It’s a bit heavier than some similar devices (7.1 ounces, about 1.7 ounces more than the Backup Plus Ultra Touch), but that weight feels right for a device like this. It will fit right in when sitting next to your high-end gaming laptop or Apple MacBook Pro.

Simply put, Mobile Drive is a gorgeous little device. It’s not something you can often say about something as pedestrian as an external hard drive, especially one that costs less than 5 cents per gigabyte for the 2TB version. The cost per gig is even lower if you choose 3TB, 4TB, or 5TB units.

What’s on Drive, What’s in the Box?

Out of the box, you get the standard stuff, plus one more cable you can expect. Of course, the bus-powered powertrain itself is the biggest of all its die-cast aluminum glory. The drive-side data connection is USB Type-C; you get a pair of cables — one USB Type-C-to-A and one dual-ended USB Type-C — along with a very simple Quick Start Guide.

That said, you don’t need much in the way of tutorials. Just plug it in and click the Start Here applet already on the drive. You will go through the rest. However, Mac users may need to reformat this exFAT formatted drive to HFS+ if they want to use Apple’s Time Machine. Some Windows users may prefer to reformat the drive to NTFS.

In another attempt to differentiate its product, LaCie also includes the LaCie Toolkit, easy-to-use software that includes backup, restore, and replication utilities. The toolkit allows you to back up manually or just set up and forget; in the latter case, your content is constantly backed up whenever any changes are made. Not surprisingly, the Mirror function allows you to synchronize files in a folder on your computer with a folder on your drive. Anything you put in (or erase) one folder cloned will show up on (or erase) the other folder.

A minor irritation: The LaCie Toolkit is not provided on the drive. You will need to download it from the LaCie website during product registration.

As an added incentive, LaCie includes a one-month subscription to all the Adobe Creative Cloud lineup apps and offers when you sign up for your drive. (You’ll need an Adobe ID, which is free.)

where can you get a LaCie Mobile Drive online

LaCie Mobile Drive 5TB External Hard Drive Portable HDD – Moon Silver USB-C USB 3.0, for Mac and PC Desktop, 1 Month Adobe CC (STHG5000400): Buy it now

LaCie Mobile Drive USB Type C: Buy it now

LaCie Mobile Drive 4TB External Hard Drive Portable HDD – Moon Silver USB-C USB 3.0, for Mac and PC Desktop, 1 Month Adobe CC (STHG4000400) (Renewed): Buy it now

Looks Slick, Is It Fast?

I’ve summarized the test results below, but the bottom line is that, when using a USB 3 connection (whether via Type-A or Type-C port), the LaCie Mobile Drive is pretty fast but not noticeably faster than any other new 2.5-inch portable drive. No surprises here. (it will work fine with USB 2.0, but be prepared to spend a lot of time waiting for the backup to complete since the port is a bottleneck.)

Hard Drive

I started testing with NTFS internal drives on Windows 10 memory tests. LaCie promises 130MBps transfer speeds; In the real world, our testing verified that the manufacturer’s estimate was dead in a best-case, straight-line test scenario.

In our Crystal DiskMark test, we got to read and write speeds straight from the drive. Only the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch and the WD Elements drive performed better (in the reading portion of the test), and that’s petty.

Next, the PCMark 7 Mass Storage Test simulates real-world productivity tasks to measure drive performance.

The LaCie Mobile Drive scored 1,148 points on the test, slightly lower than its sister drive, the Seagate Mobile Backup Ultra Plus, and slightly lower than the WD My Passport Drive. The ADATA HD830 and WD Elements both outperform the Ultra Touch, but all five drives are close enough that the performance difference would be small except for edge cases in the real world.

Switch to Apple-based testing. I run the BlackMagic Disk Speed ​​Test on a 2016 MacBook Pro, with the drive formatted in the exFAT file system. All scores on this test are within a few digits of each other, with LaCie Mobile Drive near the top.

The 2TB version of the sibling Seagate drive has very similar numbers, and the WD My Passport has the latter.

Finally, a drag-and-drop folder transfer test, where a 1.2GB folder is copied from one location on the drive to another…

In that test, sisters Seagate and LaCie tied; both need 11 seconds to do the transfer. The other drives tested took a second or two, but overall, the difference was not significant.

A Drive in Shining Armor

Let’s face it, external SSDs offer lighter, faster, and cooler storage, but you’ll have to pay a per-contract premium for all of that. If you love the good performance, massive storage, and the greatest return for your money, external hard drives are the way to go—and LaCie’s Portable Drive is the top of the pack. At around 5 cents per gigabyte to our testers, Mobile Drive offers solid value and strong performance in a sleek package, plus some handy tools that make it worth it. You won’t find a drive that looks better on your Mac (for that matter, most PCs).

Advantages

Sophisticated design.

Solid aluminum case.

The useful LaCie Toolkit software handles backup and restores, as well as duplication.

Outstanding performance.

Disadvantage

Quite heavy.

The toolkit utility requires a download.