Lacie portable High Performance SSD review: For the Pros

Such high performance in such a small form factor that sometimes you wonder, wasn’t this only a dream not too long ago? The amount of computing power we carry with us has increased manifold and at the same time we are operating in a distributed computing environment. In this age of smartphones, laptops and iPads and kindles, storage has become portable beyond belief. In 1991, 1000$ got you a 20MB flash SSD that could be used inside computers for mission critical applications, today for half the price you can get a tiny futuristic slab of storage that will meet and augment all your high performance needs. The Seagate Lacie Portable SSD is for the pros who keep moving. Let’s find out why.

Take my profession for example. My workflow involves a lot of media editing, mainly photos and videos. I do all my editing on either smartphones or laptops, and we all know external storage is an editor’s most prized asset. When we run out of space or when there’s too little space in our portable computer to copy those large video files we just shot, external hard disks come to rescue. Earlier, they used to be slow but at least, if we spent enough time, we can work out a solution by moving files around and eventually creating space for high performance work.

But in 2019, with devices like the Lacie Portable SSD, you don’t need to spend time. Because these devices are at least 12 times faster than traditional external disks. With this speed, I didn’t even need to copy the files, I could just load them up in editors like Photoshop or Premiere Pro and edit.

The product positioning couldn’t be more obvious because Adobe products are also aimed at the pros who work on media and design. The Lacie Portable SSD bundled with a free trial of the entire Adobe Creative Suite for a month is clever marketing from both the companies. It’s a perfect fit. So what’s not yet perfect in a package like this?

Sure, they are still not as fast as the internal SSDs these days which have sequential read/writes of 1.5 GBps instead of the 500-odd Mbps the Lacie SSD runs at, but for media editors like me this is beyond the needs. Videos rarely occupy more than 100 Mbps of bandwidth because I still operate in 1080p, but may be even 8K video could work smooth because REDCODE RAW records at 162 MBps. Wouldn’t 3 times the bandwidth be enough to do renders from the disk?

Sure, it’s only one month of free Adobe products. But both the Lacie Portable SSD and Adobe Creative Suite exist only to serve the needs of the performance and efficiency-driven professional. If you’re one, you should take a look at both these products and live in the future.
For context, I’m entirely new to this kind of technology as I’ve only been a consumer and not an expert at testing SSDs. I’m sure I have provided enough data to make your own opinion about this device but if you have any further specific experential questions on how I had used the device and how it performed in certain scenarios, do let me know in the comments section below.