It’s available in either black or white and finished off with a smart woven fabric that makes a nice change from the dull monochrome colors of most hard drives. The Ultra Touch measures 4.5×3.1×0.5 inches (115x78x12 millimeters) and weighs 0.3 pounds (151 grams), so you can easily slip it into a jacket pocket or a bag when you’re traveling. It has a stylish design that makes it a good companion for your MacBook, and also offers encryption to provide extra security for your important files and data. The Seagate Ultra Touch is available with either 1TB or 2TB storage. Backing up a 5GB batch of iTunes songs took exactly one minute. The Mobile Drive provides good performance, with write and read speeds both averaging out at 132MBps in our tests (almost identical to the Rugged Secure drives). Our only complaint here is that LaCie’s skimpy manual doesn’t provide much information about the ToolKit app, or the various formatting options for the drive, simply leaving you to wade through a bunch of FAQ files on its website.

This ensures that your backups are always up to date with the most recent versions of your files–Time Machine has a one-hour gap between backups.

Any folder that is mirrored is automatically backed up and updated as soon as you make any changes to any file within that folder. This is a good option if you use your Mac at work, and have individual projects organized in their own folders. The drives can be used with Time Machine for Mac backups, but LaCie offers a ToolKit app that allows you to ‘mirror’ individual folders. The Mobile Drive has a single USB-C port on the back, but LaCie includes cables for both USB-C and the older USB 3.0, so you can use the drive with any Mac or PC. Drives that are 2TB or less are physically smaller, measuring 4.8×3.5×0.4 inches (121.6×87.8×10 millimeters and weigh a more modest 0.5 pounds (200 grams). The Mobile Drives that are 4TB or more are 4.9×3.6×0.8 inches (124×91.2×20 millimeters) and weigh 0.9 pounds (400 grams) and they could give someone a serious concussion if you whacked them over the head with it. The “diamond cut” design simply refers to the exaggerated angular edges and corners looks aside, the aluminum casing feels really sturdy.

They’re available in two colors: Moon Silver and Space Gray that is intended to match the Mac. Rather than the neon-orange rubber bumper of its Rugged drives, the new Mobile Drives are wrapped in smart aluminum. LaCie’s range of Mobile Drives provide a much wider range of options, as well as a “diamond cut” design.

Best portable hard drives