LaCie Porsche Design P'9223 USB 3.0 Slim SSD Enclosure Review

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The P'9223 is the second generation of portable USB based storage solutions coming from the design collaboration with LaCie and Porsche Design. This time around the enclosure has been slimmed down from the previous 15mm to the thin spec of 11mm.

The second generation P'9223 carries two options within its sleek aluminium enclosure. The first option is a spacious 500GB hard drive and the second a 120GB solid state drive, both of which are accessed over USB 3.0. Marketing specifications for the SSD based model leave us with 425 MB/s read and 200 MB/s write, while maintaining compatibility with Mac OS X 10.5+ and modern Windows operations systems. Warranty is listed at two years.

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Within the packaging for the P'9223, you will find the drive itself, along with the USB 3.0 cable and warranty card.

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Looking over the drive, we first noticed the enclosure is a single piece aluminium design. The raised edges are made of a durable plastic and offer protection for the enclosure and internal SSD. The lower left holds a white activity LED.

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Flipping the drive over, the USB 3.0 port is housed towards the top of the plastic bezel.

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Here is a closer look of the activity LED that is white in color.

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Opening up the P'9223, we found the drive housing the ASMedia 1053 USB 3.0 controller.

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The drive used inside the Porsche Design P'9223 is the Micron C400 SSD, the OEM version of the M4.

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The LaCie setup assistant simplifies the setup process down to a few menus to run through and you are done. The second of these menus allows you to adjust the partition map for the portable drive.

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When finished with setup, the option to setup additional software is made available.

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Launching the desktop manager, we can look at the drive information.

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Above, we have our numbers in ATTO. Here you can see we were able to exceed marketing in read at 461 MB/s, while write touched 205 MB/s, just over marketing specifications.

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CDM showed more of the same results. In large block random read and write, the drive did quite well at 355 MB/s read and 150 MB/s write and the same can be said for 4K read with a QD of 32 at 130 MB/s.

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Running our P'9223 through our DiskBench testing, we find it capable of nearly 200 MB/s copying a 10GB directory.

The LaCie P'9223 is a very elegant drive designed for professionals and of course the enthusiasts where performance is of utmost importance. The build quality of the drive meet and exceeds my expectations with its single piece aluminium design that also maintains a very thin profile at just 11mm.

While we do know that the internal drive is the very reliable Micron C400, the performance that comes from such a drive is plenty to maximize the use of a USB 3.0 interface. As seen in all of our testing, the P'9223 was capable of 400 MB/s+ reads and 200 MB/s+ writes, and comes second to the AngelbirdSSD2Go in our DiskBench testing.

Over on the pricing front you will find the LaCie P'9223 120GB SSD for a reasonable $149.99, while the 500GB hard drive based model is set at $84.99.

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