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Go posh with LaCie's Porsche Design all-aluminum storage drives

By Vijay Anand - on 7 Jan 2016, 4:40pm

Go posh with LaCie's Porsche Design all-aluminum storage drives

LaCie's Porsche Design Mobile Drives (left and center), and the LaCie Porsche Design Desktop Drive (right).

While the new Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim is nice, its plastic enclosure won’t impress those looking for a quality build or just something that would match their Mac systems. That job falls in the hands of the Seagate’s premium brand of drives, LaCie, a sub brand wholly owned by Seagate. LaCie has a long history of design collaborations with world famous designers for a truly unique identity/product.

This time it’s with Porsche Design team for LaCie Porsche Design Mobile Drive and LaCie Porsche Design Desktop Drive. We’ll first touch on the mobile drive.

The LaCie Porsche Design Mobile Drive 1TB and 2TB editions are just 10mm thin and sport an all-aluminum design.

The highlight is most certainly on its full aluminum enclosure with beveled edges that will easily fit in with your Mac products. Expect the drives to be a tad heavier than you would expect since it’s made from aluminum. Even so, it’s impressive to note that the drive is just 10mm thin. This is true for the 1TB and 2TB editions. There is also a 4TB model, but that’s 20mm thick.

The drives use USB Type-C for connectivity. The drive's package also comes with the necessary cables to connect to regular USB Type-A ports too.

All editions will use a USB Type-C connector that follows the USB 3.1 Gen.1 standard. That’s equivalent to 5Gbps transfer rate and is on a par with what you would expect out of USB 3.0. This is more than fast enough for a mechanical hard drive based storage solution.

LaCie Porsche Design Desktop Drive connected to a Apple Macbook.

There’s also a desktop edition of the drive that comes in 4TB, 5TB and 8TB storage options. As can be expected, the LaCie Porsche Design Desktop Drive is bulkier as it’s meant to be parked in one location and powered from a wall socket. In addition to the same nice design as the mobile edition, the USB Type-C port on this self-powered desktop drive is able to pass through power and charge a connected laptop such as the Apple Macbook that's designed to be charged through that port. This is great if you want to keep the default power charger for the Apple Macbook in your daily travel bag, but when you reach home/office where the LaCie Porsche Design Desktop Drive is present, you can rely on it to use a single USB Type-C connector to charge and transfer data at the same time.

The LaCie Porsche Design Desktop Drive is channeling power through to the Apple Macbook only through the USB Type-C connection while drive itself draws power from the wall socket.

Suggested retail prices and availability details will be confirmed later but they should be available by the end of Q1 2016. As a guide, the LaCie Porsche Design Mobile Drive will start from US$110, and the Desktop Drive from US$210.

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