LaCie Portable SSD

Don’t immediately write off the strangely shaped LaCie – it’s better than it seems at first

SCORE

PRICE 1TB, £110 (£132 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324lac

READ SPEED 508MB/ SEC

WRITE SPEED 406MB/ SEC

LaCie’s Portable SSD uses the modern USB-C connector, but it doesn’t take advantage of modern USB standards. Rather, it’s stuck with what used to be called USB 3.0, and a maximum transfer speed of 5Gbits/sec. As the figures above illustrate, that holds it back when it comes to sequential read and write rates.

Yet things aren’t as bad as they may seem. The LaCie’s random-access performance is surprisingly competitive, besting many SSDs with faster interfaces. Clever caching even allowed the drive to rack up an effective write speed of 658MB/ sec in the AS SSD multithreaded write test, exceeding the nominal bandwidth of the USB connection. The LaCie aced the PCMark 10 storage tests as well, with a data disk score of 1,583 that puts many ostensibly faster drives to shame.

Physically, the drive itself is of a rather odd design; its footprint isn’t far off a square shape, with a slightly extruded platform on the top that presumably acts as a heatsink. Still, it’s small and slim enough to sit unobtrusively on your desk or stow away neatly in your laptop bag, and it’s good to see a bright white activity light flashing away at the front.

Since LaCie is owned by Seagate, the drive also benefits from the parent company’s Rescue Data recovery service, which will try to get your files back if the drive dies within the three-year warranty period. The price isn’t stunning, working out to 14p per gigabyte, but overall the LaCie Portable SSD is a better deal than it might appear from the spec sheet.