I tested the fastest possible SSD – it's rough, tough and really expensive

If you’re looking for something that can transfer data as quickly as possible to and from that fancy new MacBook of yours, then LaCie has you covered. You’ll need Thunderbolt 5 to get the best out of it, but if you can satisfy its craving for data there's little else that can touch it. Add to this the armoured casing that provides IP68 protection from dust and water, and you have the ideal candidate among the best external hard drives for anyone making movies in the desert.

Key specifications

Design and build

It may seem odd to talk about the design of something that’s destined to spend its life in your bag or tethered to the back of your computer, but the LaCie Rugged is a classic. The external hard drives in the range were orange, and the rubber armour they’re encased in gave them the look of a liferaft cast off from a stricken ocean liner. Women and children first, naturally. The work of Scottish designer Neil Poulton, there's one in the Centre Georges Pompidou museum in Paris, and not just to hold the night guard’s art-house movie collection.

This SSD version is smaller, and blue. Quite a strong blue, that’s going to be easy to spot if you drop it in the desert or along a lonely mountain path while hunting snow leopard with a Red Komodo over your shoulder and a MacBook Pro in your bag. It’s not a drive made for the easy life - there are much cheaper options available if that’s what you need it for.

Build quality is, as you’d expect, fantastic, with IP68 ingress protection that means you can get it quite wet and dusty before it starts to feel the effects. It’s larger than other portable SSDs we’ve tested, and heavier too (the Crucial X9 is 32g against the LaCie’s 150g), but that’s the trade-off for the extra protection and the incredibly fast speeds - it gets hot in use, so the protective layer is probably helping save our fingers as much as the drive’s innards. The armour is apparently good enough to protect the drive from the pressure of a two-ton vehicle, but unfortunately we weren’t able to test this.

• Tough
• Design classic

Design score: 5/5

Features

There's a single USB-C breaking the surface of the LaCie Rugged Pro 5, and it’s a Thunderbolt 5 port. This means you can get read and write speeds out of the drive that few others can reach, but it also means the drive has some requirements. The first is 15W of power - if your laptop can’t manage that, it’s not going to work. The drive will work with USB 4, TB4 and TB5, and it will hook up with lower speed ports too as long as they can provide the juice it needs - you might get lucky with docks that have their own power supplies, or USB 3.2 ports that can deliver PD charging.

Otherwise, you’ll need to choose your PC or Mac carefully to use the drive. Lots of machines released in the last few years will be just fine, and LaCie has a web page that gives you the lowdown on what it requires.

Otherwise, the drive comes in 2TB and 4TB configurations - we’re testing the 4TB drive here, which mounts as 3.7TB after formatting. It has some software on board, backup and data recovery that may come in handy, plus a few months of Creative Cloud subscription.

Also in the box is the world’s shortest Thunderbolt 5 cable, which we don’t really begrudge LaCie for supplying as such things can be terribly expensive, a cost you’re going to have to meet if you need to put the drive more than about nine inches away from your computer. Luckily, it has a ‘5’ on it so you won’t get it muddled up with your existing USB-C leads.

• Needs a special lead
• Picky about power levels

Feature score: 3/5

Performance

We expected the LaCie Rugged SSD to be fast, and with claimed read/write speeds up to 6700/5300 MB/s, it’s easily as fast as many internal SSDs (though not those that use the PCIe 5.0 interface, such as the Crucial T705).

We didn’t quite see those speeds in the BlackMagic Disk Speed Test, which showed 5,055 MB/s read and 2,867 MB/s write instead, which are still pretty good, but AmorphousDiskMark actually beat the claims, with peak sequential read speeds of 6956.33 MB/s and write speeds of 5272.78 MB/s.

This isn’t as fast as an internal SSD, but it beats anything with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface, such as the SanDisk Desk Drive or the tiny Seagate Ultra Compact. There's very little else that can touch the LaCie Rugged for transfer rates when connected to Thunderbolt 5.

Over USB4, which is a common fast connection on Windows PCs, it provides speeds of 1941.6 MB/s read and 1469.6 MB/s write, while on a 10Gbps USB 3.2 port it grumbled about power, then transferred at 803.5 MB/s read and 687 MB/s write. This is actually slower than other USB 3.2 drives, which suggests the LaCie Rugged needs the extra wattage a Thunderbolt port can provide.

On a Thunderbolt 4 port, we saw top speeds of 3941.73 MB/s read and 2919.5 MB/s write - not too far behind the Thunderbolt 5 results and definitely better than USB4, but with the newer technology still in the lead. The drive got noticeably hot during our testing, so the rubber armour may have a secondary purpose of protecting you from the drive, as much as the drive from its environment.

• Very fast on Thunderbolt
• Less so on USB 3.2

Performance score: 4/5

Price

This is one expensive drive with prices ranging from £395/$399.99 to £575/$599.99. You can get 2TB external SSDs, such as the Seagate Ultra Compact, for less than half the price of this one. Their speed is less than the LaCie can accelerate to, but they’re no slouches either. What you’re paying for here is the name, the design, the cachet of owning one, and the peace of mind that your data is safe wherever you are in the world. Short of dropping it in a volcano, there's little that can touch it.

Value score: 3/5

Who is it for?

• On-location video

Globe trotters, documentary makers, war photographers (it’s not bomb-proof) and even surfing filmmakers will lap this up. If your creative life takes you little further than the local coffee shop, however, it’s probably best to save your money and wait until a drive that’s equally fast, but which isn’t armoured and probably doesn’t cost as much, comes along.

Buy it if...

• You’re filming 8K on the beach
• A truck might run your bag over
• You need to transfer data really, really quickly

Don't buy it if...

• Literally anything else will do the job you need
• You don’t like blue

Also consider

Seagate Ultra Compact SSD: at creativebloq.com

This slimline SSD packs up to 2TB of storage and a 1000 MB/s transfer rate even though it’s barely bigger than a USB flash drive. It’s tough, easy to carry, and fast enough for many uses.

View Deal

WD My Passport SSD: at creativebloq.com

Bright red and available in capacities of up to 4TB, and with neat styling and ultra-lightweight credentials, The WD My Passport SSD is eminently portable. It does a fine job of transferring files quickly and safely.

View Deal

SanDisk Professiona Pro-Blade Station:

A relatively expensive, niche system suited to creative professionals who need a high-speed, permanent desk-based storage solution that allows access to SanDisk’s excellent NVMe SSD Mag system. A great concept and a slick product.