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LaCie wants to put a Porsche key in your pocket
OK, so that headline was bit ... link-baitish. But the real news is that storage accessory manufacturer LaCie and Porsche Design have teamed up to create a keychain flash drive that is both speedy and stylish. The LaCie Porsche Design USB Key (starting at US$29.99) is available starting today, and the company provided one for our review and testing. Design The key is lightweight (.3 oz, 8.5 gm) and tiny (2.1" x .5" x .15", 53 x 12 x 4 mm), while still retaining a feeling of solidity through the use of stainless steel in construction. It's available in both 16 GB ($29.99) and 32 GB ($49.99) models, and it's a bit surprising that the company didn't choose to offer a 64 GB model as well. I used one of LaCie's USB keys on my keychain for about four years until it finally split in half this year. That model was made of two pieces of aluminum that were pressed together, and it always had a somewhat flimsy feel to it. Not so with this USB key -- it feels extremely solid, and the case is made in one piece. It should definitely put up with the day-to-day pounding it will get on a keychain. The LaCie Porsche Design USB Key is USB 3.0, so copying files to and from a USB 3.0-equipped Mac is quick. LaCie provides key owners with several utilities if they wish, one of which provides AES 256-bit encryption and another that provides a year of cloud storage of the same capacity as your key through the company's Wuala storage service. LaCie doesn't "trash up" your Porsche Design USB Key with this software -- you just download it from a website if you want it. Benchmark When connected, the Porsche Design USB Key was initially formatted as MS-DOS FAT 32. I chose to open up Disk Utility and reformat the key as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) because that's the way I roll. Beginning with this device review, TUAW is using the Intech SpeedTools QuickBench benchmark app to do comparisons of disk drives. We performed the Standard Test suite in numeric view, which performs sequential and random reads and writes with varying transfer sizes. The results were pretty impressive. LaCie notes that the key can "deliver speeds up to 95 MB/s" and our testing showed that to be true -- small file read and write speeds reached approximately 91 MB/s, and for large files, read speeds were in the range of 85 - 86 MB/s. As with most drives, write speeds slowed down considerably with larger transfer sizes, dropping from an average of 66.2 MB/s below 10 MB to 24.0 MB/s between 20 MB and 100 MB. Conclusion The LaCie Porsche Design USB Key not only looks great, but has speed to match. With the one-piece stainless steel construction, the key should be able to survive jangling against a pocketful of keys for quite some time. Pros Sleek design, small footprint Solid construction USB 3.0 speed Good capacity Utility software is optional and not pre-loaded onto the key Cons None to speak of Who is it for? Anyone who needs a keychain USB flash drive who wants both speed and good looks -- kinda like a Porsche sports car
LaCie's sexy Porsche Design Slim SSD P'9223
In the five years that I've been blogging for TUAW, I've watched as the industry has shifted from USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 drive interfaces to USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt. Drives have also made a migration from spinning platters to solid-state drives (SSDs), providing more power efficiency, speed, and ruggedness. LaCie has recently released the Porsche Design Slim SSD P'9223 (US$149.99), an impossibly thin and lightweight 120 GB SSD portable drive using a USB 3.0 connection for power and data transfer. Design LaCie has partnered with design firms around the world on a number of drives designs, and first worked with Porsche Design in 2003. With the Porsche Design Slim SSD P'9223, LaCie has created a masterpiece of engineering and art. The drive is a brushed aluminum slab only 11 mm (0.4 inches) thick -- that's 6 mm less than the thickest part of a MacBook Air. The other dimensions are also pretty small, just 5 inches x 3.1 inches (128 x 79 mm). Total weight of the drive is just 6.4 ounces (182 grams). %Gallery-192196% Gracing the top of the drive is the Porsche Design logo in stark black lettering, and there's an activity LED that peeks out of a thin vertical slit in the drive. The sides are covered with a black polycarbonate material for good looks and a better grip. The only opening on the drive is a SuperSpeed USB 3.0 port that the included cable plugs into. There's no need for external power with this drive. Laptop users who need a bit more capacity can opt for a traditional spinning platter hard disk in the same form factor. The capacity of that drive is 500 GB, and the cost is a bit lower at just $89.99. Functionality Like many hard drive manufacturers, LaCie insists on loading some utilities onto the disk. Those utilities include a way to encrypt the P'9223, a backup app (most Mac users will probably prefer to use OS X's built-in Time Machine capability), and a subscription to Wuala for sharing and backing up in the cloud. Fortunately, LaCie gives users a choice in whether or not they want to use any or all of the utilities. LaCie now has a setup utility that is run before the first use of the drive. It gives users a chance to create a partition that can be used on both Windows and OS X machines, or partition the drive for OS X only. Formatting the drive is extremely fast, and then the user has an opportunity to load whatever software they've decided could be useful. The setup utility also adds a nice external drive icon that mimics the shiny aluminum case of the P'9223. The real selling point of an SSD is speed, so let's get to the benchmarks. I usually use AJA System Test to get a handle on the speed of a drive as well as make comparisons to other tested drives. But during the testing speeds were either too slow for an SSD (when file system caching was disabled) or faster than the theoretical limit for USB 3.0 (when file system caching was enabled). Since I could not verify the results, I chose instead to do a simple comparison with a USB 2.0 portable HD drive with a folder of known size. Here's the comparison, in each case writing a 912.4 MB file from a MacBook Pro with Retina display to an external drive: LaCie P'9223: 3.79 seconds Western Digital MyPassport USB 2.0: 26.24 seconds To paraphrase the late Steve Jobs, "Boom!" Read speeds were equally impressive. In this next test, a 1.18 GB Applications folder on the external drive was copied back to the MacBook Pro: LaCie P'9223: 3.59 seconds Western DIgital MyPassport USB 2.0: 31.86 seconds The P'9223 was anywhere from about 7 to almost 9 times faster in operations than a USB 2.0 hard disk drive. Regrettably, we were unable to test the P'9223 against a USB 3.0 hard disk drive. Conclusion What's not to like about the Porsche Design Slim SSD P'9223? It's fast, rugged, and looks great, and at a price tag of just $150, it's an affordable portable for your MacBook. Pros Reasonably priced Sleek and incredibly slender design Case made from solid aluminum for durability Bus-powered Cons None to speak of Who is it for? The MacBook owner who wants the speed and ruggedness of an SSD in a beautifully designed case Giveaway One incredibly lucky TUAW reader is going to win a LaCie Porsche Design Slim SSD P'9223. Here are the rules for the giveaway: Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia and Canada (excluding Quebec) who are 18 and older. To enter, fill out the form below completely and click or tap the Submit button. The entry must be made before June 25, 2013 11:59PM Eastern Daylight Time. You may enter only once. One winner will be selected and will receive a LaCie Porsche Design Slim SSD P'9223 valued at $149.99 Click Here for complete Official Rules. Loading...
