If you are a hardcore Mac user, you would definitely heard of the brand LaCie for their mobile hard drive, especially their rugged range and thunderbolt range. LaCie has been partnering with Porsche Design since 2003 and provide their customers with some very stylish products! We will be reviewing today is the LaCie Porsche Design Mobile Drive 2TB – USB 3.0 version.

The Design

I am having this mobile drive to replace my aging Western Digital Desktop drive and would also like something that looks very slick to compliment my new desktop setup for InfiniticiousTV (Subscribe if you haven’t do so already!). And this baby caught my eye! It just looks too good beside any MacBook or iMac for that matter! It has featured an aluminum casing design with Porsche Design wording on top instead of the LaCie Branding. The aluminum case that protects the hard drive are around 3mm in thickness, and it has just made the drive looks a lot up-market and luxury. Along the edge of the case, it features a small white LED light to indicate if the drive is powered on and also flashes when it read and write. It has also provided a short USB 3.0 cable inside the package as well.

Installation

Initial installation is very simple with MacOS, once you have connected the cable to the Macbook and the drive, you will see the orange setup icon showing like below…

Once you have double clicked on the LaCie Setup icon, it will launch the finder window and you will see the actual LaCie Setup program;

It will then launch the program when you clicked on it like below:

When you click “Next”, it will bring you to the partition screen, you can drag the slider to determine how much space do you want on the HFS+ (Mac format) and what they called “Lacie Share”, which is the Fat32 format. There is a significant performance difference in terms of read/write speed with this two file systems wich I will be covering later in this article. I love the flexibility of this and since I am still using the Windows platform at work, I want to keep around 500Gb in Fat32 format, just in case I need to share some files in between. However, if you are working in a pure Mac environment, my suggestion is to go full on HFS+ for the whole drive.

After that, you will be prompted with what bundled software you want to install.

Once it has finish formatting and installation of that bundled Software, you will be landing on this summary page, you will just need to click “Restart” to reboot your Macbook and start using the drive.

Once you have rebooted, you will find there are two drives on your desktop, one is named “LaCie” (HSF+ partition) and one is called “LaCie Share” (Fat32 Partition).

Performance

Since it is a USB 3.0 drive, it has claimed a transfer speed of 5Gb/s when it is connected with a USB 3.0 port and 480Mb/s when using USB 2.0. But that is only the transfer speed of what USB could do, we care about the real world read/write speed a lot more when it comes to usage.  We have then launched the Disk Speed Test application from Blackmagicdesign to try it out. One thing to note is that, do not expect SSD performance since it is a traditional drive spinning at 5400rpm.

On the HSF+ partition, we have achieved a constant result of 135MB/s Write and 135.7 MB/s Read speed.

I have mentioned in the article that there is a significant speed difference between the HSF+ and Fat32 Partition, from the screenshot below, we have tested the Fat32 Partition and the speed has just dropped right down to 74.2MB/s write and an astonishing 60.0MB/s read speed.

In order to give a justification of the speed, I have connected my Western Digital USB3.0 7200rpm Desktop drive back on, it has been formatted to HSF+ file system and we have seen the result below;

Considering the Western Digital drive is on external power and the LaCie is only on USB power, I think the LaCie did pretty damn well! Would I consider getting another one? Hell yeah! The form factor, design, and speed have just won me over.

Do you like it? You could get it from here ->

1TB Version – http://amzn.to/2kbUpIJ

2TB Version – http://amzn.to/2kbWoMZ

Okey dokey, this is all I have for you today. Please like and share this article on your favorite social media platform! And remember to subscribe to this blog and our Youtube channel as well!

Your Share = My Motivation!

J.