LaCie Mobile Drive Review

If you're looking for spiffy-looking, pocket-size mega-storage, you're living in the right era. Drives these days are inexpensive (pennies per gigabyte), and the release of LaCie's Mac-complementary Mobile Drive shows how fashionable they can be, too. A sleek, sophisticated-looking entry in the storage sweepstakes, this minimalist portable drive offers compatibility with USB Type-A or Type-C ports and comes in capacities from 1TB to 5TB. You can cram many thousands of audio, image, or video files onto even the smallest; the 2TB model (in Mac-friendly Space Grey) that we're looking at here goes for $94.95 via Apple's online store. More colors will hit Amazon and other retailers soon. It's a winner and goes well with any of Apple's laptops, as well as any slick silver ultraportable.

Metal Makes Everything Better

It's hard for makers of external platter-based hard drives to differentiate their products these days. Most perform and cost about the same at a given capacity. And after all, they all do the same job, right? So, in a commoditized niche, how to make your device stand apart from your competitors? The answer is design. Performance numbers and prices may be a yawner, but they don't have to look the same.

And LaCie's Mobile Drive does not look like the other guy's portable drive. It's a 2.5-inch, 5,400rpm drive housed in a sheer slab of faceted aluminum. It's a smooth wedge measuring 4.8 by 3.5 inches lying flat, and 0.39 inch thick. Much unlike the touchy-feely, fabric-wrapped Backup Plus Ultra Touch from LaCie's parent company, Seagate, the Mobile Drive's whole body is milled metal with mitered edges. It weighs a touch more than some similar devices (7.1 ounces, about 1.7 ounces more than the Backup Plus Ultra Touch), but that heft feels right in a device like this one. It would fit right in sitting next to your high-dollar gaming laptop or Apple MacBook Pro.

Simply put, the Mobile Drive is a stunning little piece of gear. That's not something you can say all that often about something as pedestrian as an external hard drive, especially one coming in at less than 5 cents per gigabyte for the 2TB version. The cost per gig drops even more if you opt for the 3TB, 4TB, or 5TB units. (The 4TB and 5TB versions on the Apple Store at this writing went for $139.95 and $159.95, respectively.)

What's on the Drive, What's in the Box?

Out of the box, you get the standard stuff, plus one more cable than you might expect. The bus-powered drive itself is the biggest thing, of course, in all of its milled-aluminum glory. The drive-side data connection is USB Type-C; you get a pair of cables—one USB Type-C-to-A, and a double-ended USB Type-C—along with a very minimal Quick Start guide.

That said, you don't need much in the way of instructions. Just plug it in, and click the Start Here applet that's already on the drive. You'll get walked through the rest. Mac users, though, may need to reformat this exFAT-formatted drive to HFS+ if they wish to use Apple's Time Machine. And some Windows users may prefer to reformat the drive to NTFS.

In another attempt to differentiate its offering, LaCie also includes the LaCie Toolkit, easy-to-use software that includes backup, restore, and mirroring utilities. Toolkit allows you to either back up manually or just set-and-forget, in the latter case so that your content is constantly being backed up whenever anything changes. The Mirror function, not surprisingly, lets you sync files in a folder on your computer with a folder on the drive. Whatever you place in (or remove from) a mirrored folder will show up on (or be removed from) the other folder.

One minor irritation: The LaCie Toolkit is not provided on the drive itself. You'll need to download it from the LaCie website during product registration.

As an additional incentive, LaCie includes a one-month subscription to all apps in the Adobe Creative Cloud lineup, an offer that comes available when you register your drive. (You'll need an Adobe ID, which is free.)

Looks Slick, Is It Speedy?

I've summarized the PC Labs test results below, but the bottom line is that, when using a USB 3 connection (whether over a Type-A or a Type-C port), the LaCie Mobile Drive is plenty fast, but not significantly faster than any other late-model 2.5-inch portable platter drive. No surprises here. (And yes, it will work just fine with USB 2.0, but be prepared to spend a lot of time waiting for backups to complete, due to the port being a bottleneck.)

See How We Test Hard Drives

PC Labs starts out the testing with the drive in NTFS, on a Windows 10 storage testbed. LaCie promises 130MBps transfer speeds; in the real world, our testing verified that the manufacturer's estimate was dead on in a straight-line, best-case testing scenario...

On our Crystal DiskMark test, we got read and write speeds right on the mark from the drive. Only the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch and the WD Elements drives did better (on the read portion of the test), and that only trivially so.

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

On the test, the LaCie Mobile Drive scored 1,148, slightly lower than its sister drive, the Seagate Mobile Backup Ultra Plus, and a bit further below the WD My Passport Drive. The ADATA HD830 and WD Elements both outscored the Ultra Touch, but all five drives were close enough that in the real world, performance differences would be minor except in edge cases.

Onward to Apple-based testing. PC Labs runs the BlackMagic Disk Speed Test on a 2016 MacBook Pro, with the drive formatted in the exFAT file system. All of the scores on this test came in within a few digits of one another, with the LaCie Mobile Drive near the head of the pack...

The 2TB version of the sibling Seagate drive posted very similar numbers, and the WD My Passport brought up the rear.

Last is a drag-and-drop folder transfer test, in which a 1.2GB folder gets copied from one location on the drive to another...

In that test, the Seagate and LaCie sisters tied; both required 11 seconds to make the transfer. The other drives tested took a second or two longer, but on the whole, the differences are not meaningful.

A Drive in Shining Armor

Let's face it, external SSDs offer lighter, faster, and quite literally cooler storage, but you're going to pay a premium per gig for all of that. If you're after decent performance, voluminous storage, and the biggest bang for your buck, external hard drives are the way to go—and LaCie's Mobile Drive is at the head of the pack. At about 5 cents per gigabyte for our tester, the Mobile Drive offers solid value and strong performance in a beautiful package, plus some handy tools to help you get your money's worth. And you won't find a drive that looks better with your Mac (or for that matter, most PCs). It's our new Editors' Choice among Mac-focused portable hard drives.

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Further Reading

• Early World Backup Day Sale: All-Time Low Prices on Storage Devices From WD, SanDisk
• How to Combine Multiple Hard Drives With Windows' Storage Spaces
• Deals: 4TB WD Elements Hard Drive, Lowest Price on Apple AirPods
• Seagate Will Ship 18TB and 20TB Hard Drives in 2020
• How We Test Hard Drives