LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt USB-C 2TB Review

1. Introduction2. LaCie Thunderbolt USB-C 2TB3. ATTO/CrystalDiskMark/AS SSD4. Real Life5. Backup/Restore6. Closing Thoughts7. View All Pages

LaCie's Rugged range of protected external hard drives has been with us for over a decade now with a variety of interfaces, formats and capacities to choose from depending on your needs. The latest drive range is the Rugged Thunderbolt USB-C which uses, as you might have guessed already, both Thunderbolt and USB-C interfaces.

LaCie's Rugged drives are ones you're are not likely to loose in a hurry as they all come in a bright orange rubber enclosure designed by multi design award winner, Neil Poulton.  The Thunderbolt USB-C range includes two SSD versions (500GB & 1TB) and 2TB, 4TB and 5TB HDD versions.

The official line on the protection afforded by the drive's enclosure is protection from dust and water getting into it, a drop of up to 2 meters (1.4m for the 4TB and 5TB versions) and being run over by 1-ton vehicle.

Physical Specifications:
Usable Capacities: 500GB & 1TB (SSD) 2TB, 4TB, 5TB HDD
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda
Interface: Thunderbolt, USB-C
Form Factor: External
Dimensions: 25 x 88.9 x 140.1mm
Drive Weight: 0.4kg

Firmware Version SBK2

 

The box the Rugged comes in has a good clear image of the drive showing both the Thunderbolt and USB-C connections and a label displaying the drive's capacity. The rear of the box has another view of the drive pointing out its features and an image of the other connection cables provided. There's also a speed comparison chart showing the differences between USB 3.0, 3.1 and Thunderbolt.

Finally, there are multilingual descriptions of connections and the protection offered by the drive.

One side of the box has a list of the drives specifications, its protection features, system requirements and finally whats included in the box. The other side of the box has a full-size side profile of the drive on it.

The drive is protected by a clear plastic shell which sits on top of a cardboard inner tray that not only holds the two USB cables; USB-C and USB-C to A, but also has useful diagrams on the outside to show how to hook the drive up,

 

The integrated Thunderbolt cable neatly wraps around the drive in a channel in the rubber outer case when not in use and the connection end clips onto the removable port cover so the whole cable tucks out of sight. The single USB-C port is also to be found under this cover. Should this cover go missing then a spare is provided with the drive.

Preinstalled on the drive is LaCie's Setup Assistant which aids in formatting the drive (it supports NTFS, HFS+, exFAT and FAT32) as well as the option to load Adobe Reader and Genie Timeline, LaCie's backup software.

The drive comes factory formatted as FAT32 but we re-formatted the drive as NTFS to show off its best performance and to allow us to transfer some of the very large files in the real life file transfer tests.

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.3.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.
Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.

The 2TB Rugged Thunderbolt USB-C drive has, at its heart a 5,400rpm, 128MB cache Seagate Barracuda drive.  The drive offers pretty good all round performance, but if you want faster performance then you will have to sacrifice capacity for the performance advantage of the SSD versions of the drive.

To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of the drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.

60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files.
50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files).
10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of .png, raw and .jpeg images).
10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files).

When it comes to transferring real life data, the Rugged sailed through our tests without any problems although the performance did drop off when writing the small bity files of the 50GB file folder.

As the Rugged uses a conventional 5,400rpm HDD, data transfer times are never going to set the world on fire.

We set IOmeter up (as shown above) to test both backup and restore performance on a 100GB partition. Performance wise there is nothing to separate the drives reading and writing performance for this test.

LaCie are Seagate's premium brand and the Rugged range of external drives sit under the company's Professional banner. Instantly recognisable by their bright orange Neil Poulton designed protective enclosures, the Rugged series has been around for over a decade. The range is constantly changing and updating to reflect advances in drive technology, i.e. SSD versions and interfaces, i.e the Thunderbolt and USB-C connections the review drive uses.

The drive is IP54 rated. The IP (Ingress Protection or International Protection Rating) rating is an international standard to define the sealing levels of electrical enclosures against dirt and water. The first digit indicates the level of protection against solids while the second indicates the protection against water. The first digit ranges from 0 (no protection) up to 6 for something that is dust tight. The second digit ranges from 0 (no protection) up to 8 – full protection from total immersion in water beyond 1m.

An IP54 rating means that the Rugged is protected from limited dust ingress and protected from water spray from any direction with limited ingress protection.

Not only is the drive protected from the elements, it also is protected from unwanted tinkering with any data with its AES 256-bit encryption. The drive comes with a three-year warranty.

To make the most of the performance the Thunderbolt and USB-C connections offer, you really need one of the two smaller capacity SSD versions – but if you need huge capacity over speed then the standard HDD versions should do the trick.

At the time of writing this review, we couldn't find the drive on sale anywhere but it's priced at £229.99 inc VAT.

Pros

• Data Protection.
• Choice of connections.

Cons

• Expensive.
• Not exactly pocket sized.

Kitguru says: Yes it might be expensive, but as the old adage says “what price your data?”. If you need to carry around very large amounts of data in hostile environments, LaCie's Rugged drive should fit the bill. And of course being bright orange means it should be harder to lose.

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