LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 review: The fastest external drive for your Mac
Thunderbolt 5 makes the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 the fastest drive we’ve ever tested, but it’s expensive
Pros
- Incredibly quick
- Tough and rugged
- Compact and lightweight
Cons
- Expensive
- Limited compatibility
When Apple released the latest MacBook Pro laptops and Mac mini, it made a big fuss about the inclusion of Thunderbolt 5 – but it wasn’t something I could say much about because we hadn’t yet seen any Thunderbolt-capable external hard drives. That all changes with the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5.
Thunderbolt 5 looks impressive on paper. At 80Gbits/sec, it’s capable of double the theoretical throughput at 80Gbits/sec of Thunderbolt 4 and USB4 (40Gbits/sec), enabling incredibly quick file transfers and the connection of multiple high-resolution, high-refresh external monitors.
Most people won’t need that speed and this drive can’t max out those speeds either and most won’t even own a computer capable of transferring at Thunderbolt 5 speeds. The LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 is, however, the fastest external hard disk we’ve ever tested, and that’s something worth shouting about.
LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 review: What do you get for the money?
The LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 comes in two sizes – 2TB and 4TB – and both are quite expensive. The 2TB model costs around £360 and the 4TB is £580; at the time of writing, however, it wasn’t broadly available at these prices, though, so be patient and beware price gouging. If you can do without Thunderbolt 5 speeds, then the Thunderbolt 3 (40Gbits/sec) LaCie Rugged SSD Pro is more cost-effective, starting at £272, and you can buy less exotic drives for considerably less.
You can see a full list of our recommendations on the Best external hard drive page, but two of our favourites are the £195 2TB Samsung T9 (max 20Gbits/sec) and the £140 2TB Crucial X9 Pro (max 10Gbits/sec).
Another way of looking at this, though, is by comparing the price with what Apple charges for storage upgrades when buying a MacBook Pro or Mac mini. For the former, upgrading to an internal 2TB drive is going to cost you £600 extra over the base M4 Pro laptop, and moving up to 4TB is going to cost you £1,200. In this context, the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 looks better value, especially as it’s running at internal storage speeds.
The manufacturer states that the LaCie drive is backwards compatible with Thunderbolt 4, and it will work with laptops that have USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 ports, too (10Gbits/sec). Be aware, though, that if you plug it into a USB-A port, it won’t work due to its 15W minimum power requirement.
For the money, you’re not getting an awful lot in the box. The drive comes clad in a thick, dark blue rubber jacket, which is shock and pressure-resistant and boasts IP68 dust and water resistance. This has a USB-C port in the centre of one of its long edges and a small status LED to one side, while in the box is a short (320mm) USB-C to USB-C Thunderbolt 5 cable and a quick install leaflet. Don’t lose that cable – they’re currently still quite expensive.
Stored on the drive are links to the LaCie Toolkit software for Mac and Windows, which enables you to carry out firmware updates and simple backups. The device comes with a decent five-year warranty, which includes data recovery services.
LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 review: Performance
I tested the 2TB model for this review and hooked it up to an Apple M4 Pro-powered Mac mini (M4 models only come with Thunderbolt 5). For benchmarking, I ran tests using the AmorphousDiskMark utility (similar to CrystalDiskMark on Windows) and ATTO, first using the manufacturer-recommended settings, and then the settings we use to test other drives.
The manufacturer-quoted sequential transfer rates for this drive are 6,700MB/sec for read operations and 5,300MB/sec for writes and I found peak performance in my testing came pretty close to those numbers. With LaCie’s recommended settings in ATTO (file size 32GiB, queue depth 8, streams 1, write pattern 0x00000000) the snapshot returned speeds of 7.05GB/sec for reads and 5.11GB/sec.
In AmorphousDiskMark, using LaCie’s recommended settings once again, the Rugged SSD Pro5 returned rates of 7.09GB/sec and 4.8GB/sec for sequential read and write transfers (file size 64GiB, queue depth 8, test data – zero fill).
Unsurprisingly, the manufacturer-recommended settings, particularly the zero fill setting which means the data is easy to compress, are designed to maximise benchmark results. Using test files filled with randomised data, which is a more realistic indicator of real-world performance, I saw those numbers fall.
In ATTO, switching to random data, the snapshot returned figures of 6.2GB/sec and 4.93GB/sec for reads and writes, while switching AmorphousDiskMark to the defaults we normally use to test external hard disks (file size 1GiB, queue depth 8, test data random) returned sequential transfer rates of 7GB/sec and 5.2GB/sec for reads and writes. Benchmark results for small files were not quite as impressive with an average write rate of 287MB/sec, but a read rate of 676MB/sec is mightily impressive.
To top things off, I created a Zip file 9.7GB in size and transferred it to and from the drive and to a RAMdisk, to eliminate bottlenecks. The results of that test were 7.05GB/sec for reading the file off the disk and 4.18GB/sec for writing to it.
That’s a long list of numbers, but what it boils down to is that the LaCie Rugged is, by quite a long way, the fastest external SSD we’ve ever tested. It’s more than twice as speedy as the Samsung T9 and the Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSD in most of the tests I ran on it, and it pretty much matches the speed of the internal drive on the M4 Pro Mac mini I used for testing.
LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 review: Should you buy it?
Impressive though this performance is, the list of people able to benefit from the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5’s super swift performance is quite specific.
If you don’t have a MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro or Max chip inside, or a Mac mini with the same, you’ll need a recent high-end Windows laptop – creative workstation or gaming laptop – or a desktop with a Thunderbolt 5, and those are uncommon right now.
Moreover, it won’t work on older machines due to its power requirements, so if you ever foresee the need to connect it to a laptop or PC without USB-C ports – on a site visit, for instance – then think very carefully before splashing out.
However, if you regularly work with big video files and you’re thinking of buying (or have already bought) an M4 Pro or Max-powered MacBook Pro, then there is no faster, better way of expanding your storage. It’s certainly better value than what Apple charges for its storage upgrades.
