LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 2TB - A First of its Kind Masterpiece

TweakTown's Rating: 98%

The Bottom Line

It is indeed the world's most powerful portable scratch-disk, making it a must-have for creative professionals.

Pros

• Thunderbolt 5
• Rugged
• Powerful

Cons

• Price

Should you buy it?

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Buy at Amazon for £387.13

Introduction & Drive Details

The new Thunderbolt 5 interface brings with it, for the first time, the promise of portable solid-state storage throughput rivaling that of internal SSDs. With this new level of portable storage throughput, the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 is genuinely the ultimate storage solution for creative professionals on the go.

This silicon-clad IP68-rated pocket-friendly portable SSD is as rugged as it comes; it can withstand being run over by a 2-ton vehicle, dropping up to 3 meters, and exposure to wet and dusty environments. It keeps your data safe in any environment. Speaking of the environment, the Rugged Pro5 is built with at least 45% recycled materials by weight, reducing environmental impact.

With lightning-fast Thunderbolt 5 read/write speeds of up to 6700/5300MB/s, the Rugged Pro5 is ideal for real-time 6/8K video editing. The Thunderbolt 5 interfaced device offers read/write speeds of up to 6700/5300MB/s with 50GB cache. After cache, sustained read performance maintains up to 6,700 MB/s throughput, and sustained write throughput downshifts to 1,800 MB/s for the 4TB model and 1,400 MBs for the 2TB model.

Because of the sizing of most typical data workflows, creative professionals who use Rugged SSD Pro5 as a scratch disk will almost always enjoy the cache performance, making Rugged SSD Pro5 the fastest portable scratch disk on the market.

The LaCie Rugged SSD Pro 5 is truly a premium, professional product, and it's not cheap by any stretch of the imagination. However, if you demand the very best in portable storage, then this is it. As a premium product, Seagate backs its flagship portable offering with a 5-year limited warranty, Rescue Data Recovery Services, and included Toolkit backup software. Additionally, upon product registration, you get a month free of charge for Adobe Creative Cloud.

The drive is fully compatible with all Thunderbolt 5 host interfaces, most Thunderbolt 4 hosts, and Type-C USB 10Gbps / USB 20Gbps / USB 40Gbps ports that can deliver a minimum of 15 watts. Now let's get into the review so we can show you by the numbers what this rugged, Thunderbolt 5 interfaced portable SSD can deliver.

Drive Details

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When you buy a LaCie SSD, you get the value-added bonus of free software, enabling you to get the most out of your storage solution with easy-to-use tools such as Backup, Mirror, Sync Plus, Seagate Secure, and RGB and Status LED Management. Click HERE to download it.

Best Deals: LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 2TB External SSD

	Today	7 days ago	30 days ago
	£387.13	£385.16	-	Buy
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Synthetic Benchmarks: CDM, ATTO & Blackmagic

CrystalDiskMark

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For testing the first-of-its-kind Thunderbolt 5 SSD, we employed an ASUS ProArt Z890-CREATOR WIFI Z890 LGA 1851 ATX Motherboard to get the job done. Using its onboard Thunderbolt 5 ports, we were able to attain roughly 6,100 MB/s read throughput and 5,100 MB/s throughput. This is a bit short of factory up to specs, but it is at the same time a whole other level of throughput than we've experienced from any portable storage device previously. Incredible.

ATTO

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ATTO verifies our test subject as capable of delivering essentially full sequential throughput at 128K transfers at the standard test queue depth of 4. This is exactly what we are looking for from any SSD, internal or portable. Impressive.

Blackmagic

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Is it the world's most powerful portable scratch disk for video? BlackMagic certainly says it is, and not by a little, but by a massive 50% or so. Outstanding.

Real-World Testing: PCMark 10, 3DMark SSD Gaming & Transfer Rates

PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark

The Data Drive Benchmark is designed to test drives that are used for storing files rather than applications. You can also use this test with NAS drives, USB sticks, memory cards, and other external storage devices.

The Data Drive Benchmark uses 3 traces, running 3 passes with each trace as follows:

• Copying 339 JPEG files, 2.37 GB in total,?into?the target drive (write test).
• Making a copy of the JPEG files (read-write test).
• Copying the JPEG files to another drive (read test).

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This test involves a good amount of random data and as such much of the Rugged Pro5's interface advantage is somewhat negated, resulting in a second best-ever performance for a portable storage device.

3DMark SSD Gaming Test

UL's newest 3DMark SSD Gaming Test is the most comprehensive SSD gaming test ever devised. We consider it superior to testing against games themselves because, as a trace, it is much more consistent than variations that will occur between runs on the actual game itself. This test is in fact the same as running the actual game, just without the inconsistencies inherent to application testing. In short, we believe that this is the world's best way to test an SSDs gaming prowess and accurately compare it against competing SSDs. The 3DMark SSD Gaming Test measures and scores the following:

• Loading Battlefield V from launch to the main menu.
• Loading Call of Duty Black Ops 4 from launch to the main menu.
• Loading Overwatch from launch to the main menu.
• Recording a 1080p gameplay video at 60 FPS with OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) while playing Overwatch.
• Installing The Outer Worlds from the Epic Games Launcher.
• Saving game progress in The Outer Worlds.
• Copying the Steam folder for Counter-Strike Global Offensive from an external SSD to the system drive.

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Gaming is a performance metric that matters to most DIY consumers, especially to the enthusiast crowd that TweakTown caters to. We are now including gaming performance as a part of our external SSD reviews, as using portable storage for gaming duties is very popular among avid gamers. Ultra-portable, fully compatible storage is a nice complement to any console or PC gaming device.

Here again, this testing involves a good amount of random data and as such much of the Rugged Pro5's interface advantage is somewhat negated, resulting in a second best-ever performance for a portable storage device.

DiskBench - Transfer Rates

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We brutalize our test subjects with our extremely hard-to-swallow 100GB data block. This data block is the same one we use for our internal SSD testing and is composed of more than 62K files. 100GB is probably right at the upper limit for a single transfer, so as we see it, this is a much more realistic test scenario than a sustained filling of the entire drive.

Due to its limited static cache size of 50GB and our 100GB data block exceeding the cache, our test subject delivers a programming (write) rate second to that of the SE920, which presumably has a larger cache. However, when serving data to the host (reading), the Rugged Pro5 2TB again demolishes anything previous by a massive 50%. Stunning.

Final Thoughts

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It's rugged, dustproof, and water resistant, and by far the fastest portable storage device we've ever encountered. It is indeed the world's most powerful portable scratch disk, making it a must-have for creative professionals and earning our highest award: Editor's Choice.