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LaCie’s new Porsche Design Mobile Drive USB-C will support 12″ Retina MacBook

LaCie today announced that its upcoming Porsche Design Mobile Drive USB-C (USB 3.0) will be its first design with a “user-friendly USB-C connector,” compatible with Apple’s just-announced 12″ MacBook laptop. The USB-C connector will be built into the plastic edge of the distinctively boxy solid aluminum housing, with an included adapter cable for traditional USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 connector compatibility. Using USB-C or USB 3.0, the drive promises transfer speeds up to 100MB/second, with a speed reduction when using USB 2.0.

The drive will come in three capacities: a slim 500GB model (shown below) and regular-sized 1TB and 2TB units (shown above). LaCie has not yet announced pricing for the drives, but plans to release them in the second quarter of 2015. We would expect to see quite a few USB-C drives by then, as both Apple and its customers continue a transition away from Thunderbolt that seemed inevitable back in 2013.

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Comments

  1. monty72 - 10 years ago

    WOW a silver square box designed by Porsche! Seriously what are they bringing to the table here?

  2. scumbolt2014 - 10 years ago

    Just another kick to the nuts for Thunderbolt. The only Mac that uses a USB-C connection has a device already announced, while Thunderbolt has been treated like a plague by third party manufacturers. Shame on Intell too.

    • driverbenji - 10 years ago

      what sucks about this is that Thunderbolt can do much more speed and go with much longer cables with optical fiber cables…which I wish they would have started with. I really don’t get all these copper wire cable standards in recent years, HDMI should have been tossed out for an optical cable connection, we would have a much easier time going to 4K. I’m guessing the copper wire industry is huge, stands to lose if we switched to optical. Yeah, they’re expensive now, but, if production were stepped up, it would go down. If R&D went into manufacturing optical cables instead of wired standards, this would also help. When not using wireless connections, I would like to see optical for everything “wired”. (go to apple’s web, search for thunderbolt optical)

  3. scumbolt2014 - 10 years ago

    Plus it includes a cable, so you won’t need to pay another 40 dollars to even use it.

  4. driverbenji - 10 years ago

    uh, USB C is the new USB 3.1 spec., not 3.0 [“Porsche Design Mobile Drive USB-C (USB 3.0)”], so, is this a typo?

  5. golfersal - 10 years ago

    This is getting as insane as the Apple Watch, we shouldn’t have to get this stuff. We should have the necessary slots to do our work, which means a computer should have two usb slots, a thunderbolt slot and a slot for video. The present macbook pro’s are perfect.

    Maybe this machine will cater to folks that don’t have to do heavy duty work and back up things. So for the real professional maybe this is not the right kind, unless you want a second computer for travel. But I thought the Ipad takes care of that need.

  6. yleeuw - 10 years ago

    Yes! LaCie is a product i will buy again (not)

  7. Lacie has the highest failure rate in the entire industry. So good luck buying their drives with their POS mechanism inside and power inverters that fail with a power surge all the freaking time.

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