LaCie Rugged RAID Shuttle Review

TweakTown's Rating: 85%

The Bottom Line

For those in the market for a high capacity portable solution, the LaCie RR Shuttle is the best and only legit option.

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If I could go out on a limb, I'd suggest the Rugged lineup from LaCie may be the most iconic in the portable drive market. These drives have been providing durable high capacity storage since 2005, so much so that many film sets, photo shoots and creative pros take advantage of the Rugged family of drives.

The Rugged RAID Shuttle is the latest from LaCie and the first high capacity solution designed to fit express shipping envelopes from FedEx, UPS, and DHL. In addition, this solution offers a substantial performance increase over single drive solutions thanks to its dual-drive RAID setup. The Shuttle offers 4ft of drop resistance along with a 2200lb or 1-ton crush rating; it also enjoys IP54 certification for dust and water intrusion.

Performance is rated at 250 MB/s in RAID 0 while taking advantage of USB-C connectivity. Compatibility includes Windows and macOS systems with an available USB 3.0, USB-c or Thunderbolt 3 port. MSRP of the 8TB Rugged RAID Shuttle comes in at $529.99 with a three-year warranty.

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Packaging offers an image of the drive centered, capacity, and performance at the top right.

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The spine of the box offers full specifications.

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Scope of delivery includes the power adapter, USB-C, and USB 3.0 cables.

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The Shuttle follows the iconic Rugged design with an aluminum shell covered by an orange silicone sleeve. Branding is etched into the aluminum.

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The edge of the drive offers a sealed power input; used only if you are using the A to C USB cable. In direct USB-C mode, the drive is bus-powered.

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Internally, the Shuttle uses two Barracuda 4TB drives held together with an aluminum frame with anti-vibration mounts.

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To get the most out of the Shuttle, LaCie includes RAID manager. This software allows you to manage the array and health of your drive along with any updates the drive may need.

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Testing the Shuttle, I started with CDM and came away with 273 MB/s read and 40 MB/s write in RAID 0.

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RAID 1 was about half of the performance above; 127 MB/s read, and 28 MB/s write.

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Moving over to real data, our 10GB photo backup took 83 seconds in RAID 0 at 109 MB/s. That same test in RAID 1 took 127 seconds at 72 MB/s.

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Large file transfers were much quicker with the shuttle moving a 6GB ISO at 220 MB/s in RAID 0 and 113 MB/s in RAID 1

As is expected of LaCie, the build quality of the Shuttle is fantastic. Starting with a pleasing aluminum shell, the drives are secured with shock mounts allowing movement of the fasteners in a drop situation, reducing overall vibration felt by the internal drives. The exterior overmold too increases the durability of the drive softening the blow dealt to the aluminum.

Performance of the Shuttle was quite good in read operations with our synthetic benchmark runs through CDM. However, we did see terrible write performance in both RAID 0 and 1 when using CDM. Moving to DiskBench, we tossed around real data from our NVMe to the Shuttle and found rather solid performance with the drive reaching 109 MB/s with a 10GB photo backup and 220 MB/s pushing a 6GB ISO.

Pricing on the Shuttle from LaCie hits around the $499.99 from several online retailers with MSRP set at $529.99. In researching for this review, I was not able to find a single comparable solution the LaCie Shuttle in capacity with its portable form factor.

Tyler's Test System Specifications

• Motherboard: ASUS Prime Z370 (buy from Amazon)
• CPU: Intel Core i3 8350K (buy from Amazon)
• RAM: Corsair Vengeance 32GB 4x8GB DDR4 3200 (buy from Amazon)
• Cooler: Corsair Hydro H115i (buy from Amazon)
• Case: Corsair Air 540 (buy from Amazon)
• OS Storage: Samsung 960 EVO 250GB (buy from Amazon)
• Power Supply: Corsair RM850x (buy from Amazon)
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 (buy from Amazon)
• Wi-Fi NIC: ASUS PCE-AC88 (buy from Amazon)
• 10Gbe NIC: ASUS XG-C100C (buy from Amazon)
• Thunderbolt 3: ASUS Thunderbolt EX3 (buy from Amazon)