LaCie intros Portable SSD with 10Gbps USB-C, storage up to 2TB

LaCie on Wednesday announced its new Portable SSD, an external drive intended for people working in video, photography, and other media-intensive fields.

The drive uses USB 3.1 Gen 2, supporting throughput up to 10 gigabits per second via an included USB 3.1 type-C cable. Alternately a second cable can connect to USB-A devices.

Read speeds run up to 540 megabytes per second, enough to transfer an hour of 4K 30fps video in less than a minute, according to the company. Write speeds are slightly slower at 500 megabytes per second.

The drive comes pre-formatted in exFAT, and in 500-gigabyte, 1-terabyte, and 2-terabyte configurations typically priced at $124.99, $269.99, and $539.99 respectively. The 2-terabyte option should be enough to hold up to 65 hours of 4K30 video, or as many as 20,000 RAW photos, assuming a 100-megabyte image size.

The LaCie Portable SSD can be preordered at B&H, where the 1-terabyte version is marked down to $249.99 ($20 off retail). The 2-terabyte model is on sale for $509.99, while the 500GB option is $114.99.

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12 Comments

soundsinamotion

said about 5 years ago

Ooooh! This is very tempting! Been waiting for a 2tb ssd that was under $500!

6toecat

said about 5 years ago

Wish it came in 16Tb

inexco

said about 5 years ago

I found a way to have my 2 TB drive in the Mac Mini for less than what Apple charges for the 500 GB upgrade.
My late 2012 has 1 TB of SSD (after 1 TB drive failed and I replaced. and 1 TB of mechanical)

so how much faster is the new i7 than mine ...?

soundsinamotion

said about 5 years ago

inexco said:

I found a way to have my 2 TB drive in the Mac Mini for less than what Apple charges for the 500 GB upgrade.
My late 2012 has 1 TB of SSD (after 1 TB drive failed and I replaced. and 1 TB of mechanical)

so how much faster is the new i7 than mine ...?

A six year old laptop is probably way slower than a current one, but if you are happy with it then no need to upgrade.

chasm

said about 5 years ago

inexco said:

I found a way to have my 2 TB drive in the Mac Mini for less than what Apple charges for the 500 GB upgrade.
My late 2012 has 1 TB of SSD (after 1 TB drive failed and I replaced. and 1 TB of mechanical)

so how much faster is the new i7 than mine ...?

Here, let me ~~Google~~ AppleInsider search that for you: https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/17/what-six-years-of-retina-macbook-pro-evolution-gets-you

For comparison, the 2012 MBP Geekbench scores for the i7 quad-core version are 3371 for single and 6572 for multi. The 2018 quad-core i7 scores are 5583 single, and 18,840 for multi. So, depending on what you're doing somewhere between "roughly double" and "roughly triple" the speed from that CPU.

More importantly in terms of user perception, however, is the SSD speed. The SSD you have in your 2012 is around 10x faster than a 5400rpm hard drive, sure, but the current SSD tech used in the MBP is 10x faster than your SSD. This makes at least as big a difference (if not way larger) in the overall user perception of speed. File copies of even multi-GB large files are nearly instantaneous.

The 2012 was a great machine (part of that was the advanced chipset it used before Intel entered its decline, part of that was that it was not terribly difficult to upgrade) -- I'm writing this to you on my mid-2012 non-Retina one right now! -- but the new model surpasses it in every possible way by multiple times over. This is probably a really good year to upgrade.

Pro tip: keep Mojave on the old 2012 and keep it around to help you more easily transition away over time from obsolete apps that can only run in 32-bit mode. Mojave will be supported with security updates for at least another three years, so even if (IF) the 2012 gets left behind with the next macOS version, it's still a perfectly safe machine to use into 2020 at least.