LaCie Starck Mobile review

We reviewed LaCie’s Starck Mobile disk around a year ago, but the company hasn’t updated its range to include a USB3 model. The Starck is certainly tough; the outer enclosure is made from 2mm thick aluminium that should withstand a fair amount of punishment. The smooth and rounded design looks great, but the quality materials add to its weight; at 355g you’ll certainly notice it in your pocket.

At least you won’t have to worry about carrying a USB cable with you when taking your data on the move; a short 12cm USB cable is embedded in this external hard drive‘s enclosure. An extension cable is included in the box.

Unsurprisingly the Starck wasn’t particularly fast in our file transfer tests. Large files were written at 30.9MB/s and read at 47.5MB/s, which might be reasonable for a USB disk but are slow compared to USB3. Small files were written even slower at 19.6MB/s and read at 22MB/s.

The bundled LaCie Genie backup software is easy enough to use, but lacks many of the advanced features found in other programs. If you don’t make regular data backups it could be useful, but if you already have a preferred tool you’re unlikely to use this.

A year on, the Starck Mobile doesn’t compare well to portable disks from other manufacturers. It costs more than other 500GB disks with USB3 interfaces, and is naturally much slower. The choice between this and the similarly tough