LaCie Rugged SSD Pro

amazon LaCie Rugged SSD Pro reviews

The LaCie Rugged SSD Pro external hard drive is designed for professional videographers and others working in the field with Thunderbolt 3 equipped computers (usually Macs).

Most people don’t need and won’t want to pay for the extreme speed and durability of LaCie’s Rugged SSD Pro external solid-state drive. If you’re a videographer, filmmaker, or professional working in the field — and if you have a Thunderbolt-3-equipped laptop, so you can get the most out of it, of the device — you can consider it a bargain even if it’s List Price $419.99 for the 1TB version tested here or $739.99 for the 2TB version. The LaCie is housed in an impact-resistant, silicone-coated aluminum case, small and light enough to fit in a shirt pocket, big enough rugged to meet the IP67 spec for dust and water resistance, and is rated to survive a 3 meter (10 foot-plus) drop.

Extremely fast, extremely sure

The speed and durability of the Rugged SSD Pro are pretty much tied for being its most impressive feature. For the first time, it combines a Seagate FireCuda NVMe SSD with a Thunderbolt 3 interface. LaCie rates this combination at 2,800MBps for both disk reads and writes, compared to 2,800MBps for reads and 2,300MBps for writes claimed for Samsung Portable SSD X5 — another SSD that combines NVMe with Thunderbolt 3. The only other we’ve tested so far with similar performance.

The FireCuda SSD is also a good start for certainty, as SSDs are inherently sturdier than disk drives. LaCie adds to that by enclosing it in an aluminum housing that’s water-, dust-, and shock-resistant. It is further protected by being encased in silicone leather that is pleasant to the touch and has just enough friction to prevent slipping out of your hand. Sleek black case with rounded edges, measures 0.7 x 3.9 x 2.6 inches, weighs just 3.5 ounces, and is light enough to fit comfortably in a shirt or pants pocket.

As for water and dust resistance, the Rugged SSD Pro’s IP67 ingress protection rating translates to the highest level for dust resistance — defined as dust-tight — and one of the higher for dust resistance, water-resistant, can survive 30 minutes of immersion in shallow water. Even better, waterproofing doesn’t depend on whether you remember to close the lid over the Thunderbolt 3 port. The connector itself is water-resistant, so there’s no need to cover it. You can spill some water on your hard drive, get splashed in the rain, or even drop it in a puddle without worrying about it. LaCie rates the hard drive’s 3-meter drop and its impact resistance to survive being run over by a vehicle weighing up to 2,000 kg or 4,410 pounds.

All of this puts the Rugged SSD Pro ahead of most external SSDs — not to mention disk-based hard drives — in terms of ruggedness. For example, the SanDisk Extreme Pro portable SSD only offers an IP55 rating. The ADATA SE800 offers an IP68 rating for one step more water resistance — think of dropping it in a pond instead of a puddle. But it also has a lower drop tolerance, rated at only 4 feet.

Small Gadgets: Connections, Cables, and More

The Rugged SSD Pro offers one USB Type-C port and comes with a single USB-C-to-USB-C cable. However, ports and cables support both Thunderbolt 3 ports and – at least to some extent – ​​USB 3.1 Gen 1 and Gen 2 ports, which is not always the case with Thunderbolt 3 drives, including the Samsung Portable SSD X5 in particular. That can be crucial if you want to take advantage of Thunderbolt 3 speeds in the field and then send the hard drive to someone who may have a PC with a USB 3.1 port.

Note that the cable is only 8 inches long, making it difficult to connect to a tower computer without leaving the hard drive hanging in the air, but that’s a minor issue. There’s also a status light next to the port, making it easy to tell when the drive is active.

Neither LaCie’s website nor the hard drive manuals state whether the hard drive is compatible with USB 3.1 ports with a USB Type-A connector. I asked LaCie for clarification and was told no. But in the meantime, I tried it with the Dell G3 laptop’s USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A port — using the included cable and USB 3.1-enabled USB-C to USB-A adapter — and the PC recognized the driver without any problems. So even though the connection is not officially supported, you can still see it working with your computer.

The hard drive is preformatted with exFAT so that it will work with both PC and Mac. If you’re not moving it between different types of computers, you can format it in the operating system’s native format — NTFS for Windows or preferably HFS+ for Mac. You can also format it with APFS, Apple’s file system for SSDs, but if you do, you won’t be able to use it with Time Machine for backups.

Included with the hard drive is a downloadable LaCie Toolkit, a five-year warranty, and a five-year Rescue Data Recovery Service. The first time you load the Toolkit, it will allow you to reformat the hard drive. If you want to reformat it later, you will have to use the built-in tools in your operating system. The only other features the Toolkit offers are mirroring plus backup and restore, both of which are part of Seagate’s Sync Plus app. Mirroring allows you to specify folders on your LaCie drive and the hard drive on your computer. It automatically synchronizes each folder with the other when you move files to or delete them from one folder in two. The Backup and Restore tool allows you to define full or partial backups to run continuously, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or just once, but only for Windows.

How fast?

We compared the Rugged SSD Pro with the Samsung Portable SSD X5 for our official benchmark tests, which also combines Thunderbolt 3 and NVMe interfaces and four much cheaper SSDs that use the USB interface. 3.1 Gen 2: ADATA SE800, Crucial X8, SanDisk Extreme Pro, and Samsung Portable SSD T7 Touch.

All four USB 3.1 drives received praise for speed when we evaluated them. Make no mistake: the descriptions — from fast to super fast — are displayed as soon as we write them. But today, we’ll have to add a benchmark and call them fast for the price, or fast for USB 3.1: Compared to LaCie Rugged SSD Pro and Samsung Portable SSD X5 connected to Mac’s Thunderbolt 3 port, they are all very good. (It’s all relative, of course; they’re still SSDs.) — spoiler alert — between the two Thunderbolt 3 drives, Samsung is right to brag when posting the absolute best results, though the difference is small.

Note that we only show two tests from our usual benchmarks. When we tried running the others on our standard Intel X299-based test platform with the Rugged SSD Pro connected to a USB 3.1 Gen 2 port, we ran into problems that we didn’t encounter with the portable SSD X5. Fortunately, this doesn’t take much. Not only are Thunderbolt 3 ports still relatively rare on PCs, but if you’re a videographer or filmmaker, chances are you’re on a Mac, so the two tests we’ve got are The only check that you might be interested in.

where can you get a LaCie Rugged SSD Pro online

LaCie Rugged SSD Pro 1TB Solid State Drive — USB-C Thunderbolt 3, Drop Shock Dust Water Resistant, for Mac and PC Computer Desktop Laptop, 1 Mo Adobe CC (STHZ1000800): Buy it now

LaCie Rugged SSD Pro 2TB Solid State Drive — USB-C Thunderbolt 3, Drop Shock Dust Water Resistant, for Mac and PC Computer Desktop Laptop, 1 Mo Adobe CC (STHZ2000800): Buy it now

Blackmagic 3.1 Disk Speed ​​Test

Blackmagic bench utility, which runs on our MacBook Pro laptop, measures hard drive traffic to play various video formats. For obvious reasons, this is exactly the benchmark test that videographers are most interested in.

Even a quick look at the graph shows that both Thunderbolt 3 / NVMe drives are on a completely different level of performance from the USB 3.1 SSD.

Three conclusions stand out. First, the hard drives in each class have similar performance. Second, the Rugged SSD Pro and Portable SSD X5 scored nearly twice as high as the fastest USB 3.1 drive in the Disk Read test and more than double that in the Disk Write test. And thirdly, although the Samsung Portable SSD X5 delivers a slightly higher score than the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro, the difference is only about 2% in the Disk Read test and less than 5% in the Disk Write test. That is too little to notice in any real-world usage.

Check folder transfer

Our drag-and-drop folder transfer test on our MacBook Pro laptop consisted of copying our standard 1.2GB folder from the test drive to the hard drive.

The Samsung Portable SSD X5 LaCie took 1 second compared to 2 seconds for all other hard drives, best understood as the statistical tie for all six hard drives. We time it to 1/10th of a second manually with a stopwatch, then round to the nearest second, so a difference of a few hundredths of a second in reaction time can make a difference of 1 second in reported results.

Hardest Drive in the West (East, North or South)

Anyone who uses an external hard drive with their laptop can benefit from having a hard drive as sturdy and fast as the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro. But unless speed or ruggedness is something you absolutely must have, it’s hard to justify the high price per gigabyte. In most cases, it makes more sense to get a more affordable USB 3.1 SSD, like the ADATA SE800, Crucial X8, SanDisk Extreme Pro, or Samsung Portable SSD T7 Touch.

If ruggedness is your primary concern and you spend a lot of time working near bodies of water, you may want to consider the SE800 for a higher water resistance rating. But keep in mind that you have to put the SE800’s port cap on to get a higher level. Meanwhile, the LaCie matches or beats it on all other scores in terms of ruggedness, and it’s mostly tied with Samsung for the best performance we’ve ever measured. If you need ruggedness combined with extreme performance, then the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro is the hard drive to get.

Advantages

Class-leading speed

Also works with USB-C 3.1 Gen 1 and Gen 2  ports

Extremely durable against dust, water, drops, crushing pressure

Five-year warranty

Defect

High price per gigabyte

The cable is a bit short