Today we are publishing the third of our portable storage reviews and this time around we have our first product by LaCie which was released late last year called the Portable SSD.
Although this is not LaCie’s first portable storage unit which uses solid state technology (we are actually going to take a look at a previous SSD LaCie has in its line on one of our next reviews) it does seem to be based on a new design both externally and possibly also internally (it also looks suspiciously like the Seagate Fast SSD).
The LaCie Portable SSD is made from a combination of metal and plastic, it is just over 3.5 inches long (9 cm) and 3 inches wide (7 cm) wide and weighs 2.9 ounces (82 grams).
Just like the Sandisk and the WD SSDs that we have recently reviewed, the external design of the LaCie is very minimalistic it has no buttons or switches of any sort and the only connector is a single USB-C. It does have a tiny LED indicator for status though. It comes with a single 50cm or 20-inch USB-C to USB-C cable (longer than some of the other drives although we would still like to see 1m as a standard) as well as a USB-C to USB-A cable.
The LaCie Portable SSD – Maxing out SATA
Just like the two last times, we used our brand new fast studio computer to perform our tests (this behemoth has a Core i9-9900K processor, 32GB of RAM with an Asus RTX 2070 GPU and Z390 Gigabyte DESIGNARE motherboard with built-in dual TB3 ports and two Samsung 970 NVME drives running with the latest win 10 Pro).
As we have done before we have conducted both synthetic tests using CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2 and real-world transfer tests where we moved a number of larger and smaller video files from our computer to the drive.
On our test, CrystalDiskMark showed a very impressive score 562MB/s read and 499MB/s write (the read is actually faster than the official LaCie drive speed which is 540MB/s). It is also quite a bit faster than the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD that we have reviewed recently.
The more interesting and realistic test was our real-world file transfer, were we moved 5.65GB of files to the drive in over 13 seconds which is about 434MB/s and from the drive to the computer we got 18 seconds or 313MB/s (somewhat slow but we had to use a different computer so this might have something to do with that).
The performance of the LaCie Portable SSD really took us by surprise. It surpasses the official LaCie specifications in our syntactic benchmarks and is faster than any other portable drive that we have tested to date (at least in read speed) on our real-world tests. This performance is probably as close as it can be to the max limit of SATA drives and you will need to move to NVME drives to get any faster.
When it comes to cost, although this drive is a little bit more expensive than the Sandisk and WD that we recently tested, the difference seems small enough to be warranted by the increased performance and you can currently get the 1TB version which we have tested for $210.
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Iddo Genuth 
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