Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsBE ADVISED...TRANSFER SPEEDS ARE MUCH SLOWER THAN STATED!
Reviewed in the United States on January 31, 2019
They state, "Thunderbolt speeds up to 510MB/s with SSD (HDD up to 130MB/s)". This was not true for me!
I own about 20 external drives, so I am quite familiar with what to expect. This drive is among the slowest I have encountered. I have a 6 year old USB 1 drive that speedier than this drive. Using a MacBook Pro 2018 with Thunderbolt 3 USB 3.1 connections, this drive transfers data at the rate of about 25 MB per second, not the 510 MB stated on the product. I am less than impressed at these speeds. For example, I am transferring 2 TB of data right now, and it will take about 24 hours to complete the process. If you do the math, it is about 25MB per second...a far cry from their advertised speeds. Even at 130MB per second, the minimum of what they state, this job would take 4 hours, not 24 hours.
The other annoying thing about this drive is that it states that it is USB 3.0 compatible but it is not Thunderbolt 3. They do provide all of the cabling you will need to connect to most any computer, but there is a pre-installed cable that wraps around the drive and tucks in at the end. If you own a computer that uses this connection, then you are good as gold. But if your computer doesn't have this connection, then you are stuck with the cable wrapped around the drive that you will never use. It's annoying and it is in the way and it cannot be removed. While I agree with the idea of what Lacie is trying to do, it only serves those people who own computers that use that specific cable connection. If you don't have a computer with that connector, then it's a useless appendage and an annoyance.
I would expect to see better performance and product from a company like Lacie. I own many of their older drives, so I thought to give them another shot, but sadly disappointed.
And lastly, I paid a premium of about 80% more for this drive over a similar drive, just so that I could take advantage of the USB Thunderbolt speeds, only to find the speed to be about 5% or at best 10% of the stated transfer speeds.
One final point of fact, I took a 335 GB group of files and simply duplicated them on the drive itself....meaning that the information was not transferred from one device to another device...they were just copied on the same drive itself. That task took more than 4 hours. If you do the math, you will find that the transfer (duplication) speed was 23.3 MB per second!
