The latest addition to LaCie's popular range of Rugged external hard drives is the Rugged SSD4, a drive aimed at photographers, filmmakers and audio professionals. Using a USB4 40 Gbps interface, it offers fast performance while protecting against water, dust, and drops. Inside the familiar bright orange rubber enclosure (designed by multi-award-winning designer Neil Poulton) sits an NVMe PCIe Gen 4 SSD to make the most of the USB 40 Gbps (USB4) interface. Available in 1TB, 2TB and the flagship 4TB versions, the drive is rated for up to 4,000MB/s reads and up to 3,800MB/s writes. The official line on the protection afforded by the drive's enclosure is that it is IP54-compliant (if the cover for the USB port is firmly in place) and can withstand a 3m drop and 1 ton of pressure. LaCie backs the drive with a 3-year warranty, and you also get a very useful three years of Seagate's Data Recovery Service included to recover your data in case of product failure. Physical Specifications: Usable Capacities: 4TB. NAND Components: n/s. NAND Controller: n/s. Interface: USB 40Gbps (USB-C). Form Factor: external. Dimensions: 17.33 x 66.87 x 105.34mm Drive Weight: 108g. Firmware Version: ULFS91.6 The box the Rugged SSD4 comes in has a good, clear image of the drive showing the USB-C connection and the cover that protects it. On the top right-hand side of the box is a sticker that states the drive's capacity. Under the image is a blue disc with a dual-language statement describing that the product contains a minimum of 35% recycled materials. On the opposite side to this is an icon displaying the fact that the drive comes with 3 years of Seagate's Data Recovery Service. The rear of the box has an image of the drive plugged into a laptop. Under this image are three icons: throughput speed, drop/dust protection and what the drive is compatible with. One side of the box offers a profile view of the drive. The other side has a list of the drive's specifications, its protection features, system requirements, OS support, and finally what's included in the box. The Rugged SSD4 has a brushed aluminium finish, surrounded by the bright orange Neil Poulton-designed rubber enclosure, with the whole unit weighing in at 108g. The USB-C port is hidden behind a removable cover at one end of the drive, but not being attached to the drive, it could be easy to lose if care is not taken. Bundled in with the drive is a short USB-C cable and a Quick Install Guide. Pre-installed on the drive are Windows and Mac apps that link out to the LaCie website. Using this, you can register the drive, download the LaCie Toolkit Backup and Sync Software and take up the 2-month Adobe Creative Cloud Pro offer. Out of the box, the drive is factory formatted as exFAT. To run some of our benchmarks, we reformatted the drive to NTFS. CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSDs. We are using V8. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage system's performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customise 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 manufacturer's 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 benchmarking 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. LaCie's official Sequential performance ratings for the Rugged SSD4 are up to 4,000MB/s for both reads and up to 3,800MB/s writes. Using our test setup, the fastest read figure we saw was 3,110MB/s (CrystalDiskMark 8 Peak Performance profile QD8 T1) while the fastest write performance, 2,996MB/s, came from the CDM8 Default 0 fill test. The fastest 4K read and write performance came from the Peak Performance 0 fill test (QD32T16) at 1,078.01MB/s for reads and 1,109.22MB/s for writes. In our read throughput test, the drive peaked at the end of the test run (16MB block) at 2,714.67MB/s, well short of the official maximum of 4,000MB/s. Writes peaked at the same area as reads at 2,754.71MB/s, again well short of the official 3,800MB/s maximum. Even though the peak read figure of 2,714.67MB/s is well short of the official maximum figure, it's still the second fastest external drive we've seen to date. As with the read throughput test result, the peak write result of 2,754.71MB/s may be well short of the official maximum, but once again, it's the second fastest drive we've seen in this test. The PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark has been 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. Trace 1. Copying 339 JPEG files, 2.37 GB in total, into the target drive (write test). Trace 2. Making a copy of the JPEG files (read-write test). Trace 3. Copying the JPEG files to another drive (read test) Here we show the total bandwidth performance for each of the individual traces. The Rugged SSD4 does a good job of handling the PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark, sitting in third place in the results charts for all three tests and overall bandwidth. The 3DMark Storage Benchmark uses traces recorded from popular games and gaming-related activities to measure real-world gaming performance. Traces used: Battlefield V Loading Battlefield™ V from launch to the main menu. Call of Duty Black Ops 4 Loading Call of Duty®: Black Ops 4 from launch to the main menu. Overwatch Loading Overwatch® from launch to the main menu. Game Move Copying the Steam folder for Counter-Strike®: Global Offensive from an external SSD to the system drive. Game Recording Recording a 1080p gameplay video at 60 FPS with OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) while playing Overwatch®. Installing Game Installing The Outer Worlds® from the Epic Games Launcher. Game Saving Saving progress in The Outer Worlds game. The LaCie 4TB Rugged SSD4 seems to handle the 3DMark Storage Benchmark quite well. The best bandwidth figure came from the move game test trace at 1,486.85MB/s, the slowest came from the save game test at 120.54MB/s. We took note of the drive’s temperature during some of our benchmarking runs. During our benchmarking, the hottest the drive got was 44 °C during the 3DMark Storage Benchmark run. The Rugged SSD4 averaged 33.6° C for our benchmarking runs. To test the 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 2TB Seagate FireCuda 510. Transfer Details: Data file – 100GB. File folder – 50GB – 28,523 files. Movie demos 8K – 21GB – (11 demos). Raw Movie Clips 4K – 16GB – (9 MP4V files). Audio Folder – 10GB – 1,483 files – (1479 @ MP3, 4 @ .FLAC files). Single large image – 5GB – 1.5bn pixel photo. 3D Printer File Folder – 4.25GB – (166 files – 105 @ .STL, 38 @ .FBX, 11 @ .blend, 5 @ .lwo, 4 @ .OBJ, 3@ .3ds). AutoCAD File Folder – 1.5GB (80 files – 60 @ .DWG and 20 @.DXF). The 4TB LaCie Rugged SSD4 averaged 1,503MB/s when writing the 8 transfer tests, the fastest being the 4K folder at 2,717MB/s. Reading back the data, the drive averaged 2,561MB/s for the eight tests, the fastest being the 5GB Photo at 3,125MB/s. LaCie is Seagate’s premium brand, and the Rugged range of external drives sits 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, and the latest addition to the model lineup is the Rugged SSD4, available in three capacities: 1TB, 2TB and a flagship 4TB version. The range is constantly changing and updating to reflect advances in drive technology, i.e. SSD versions and interfaces, i.e Thunderbolt and USB-C connections. The palm-sized Rugged SSD4 uses a Gen 4 NVMe SSD matched to a USB 40 Gbps, Thunderbolt 5 compatible interface. LaCie rates the read performance of the drive as up to 4,000MB/s with writes up to 3,800MB/s. LaCie quotes a file transfer rate of up to 4,000 MB/s and 3,800 MB/s for reads and writes, respectively, for the Rugged SSD4. Using the ATTO benchmark, we couldn't hit the official maximums; the best we saw was 2,771MB/s for reads and 2,880MB/s for writes. Switching over to the CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark, we could get a bit closer to the official figures, the best being the 3,110MB/s from the default Peak Performance test. The best write figure, 2,996MB/s, came from the Default 0 fill test. With a nod to the environment, the Rugged SSD4 contains at least 35% recycled materials by weight, including pre-consumer and post-consumer material. 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 SSD4 is protected from limited dust ingress and from water spray from any direction, as long as you remember to use the port cover. Thanks to its rubber enclosure, the drive can withstand a 3m drop and 1 ton of pressure. LaCie bundles two useful services with the Rugged SSD4 - a 2-month membership to Adobe Creative Cloud Pro and 3 years of Seagate's Data Recovery Service. We found the 4TB version of LaCie's Rugged SSD4 on Jigsaw24.com for £474 (inc VAT) HERE. Pros Physical data protection. USB 40 Gbps and Thunderbolt 5 compatibility. Cons Pricey. The port cover is easy to lose. KitGuru says: LaCie's Rugged products have always been popular with professional photographers and videographers who are constantly on the move, and the Rugged SSD4 delivers both capacity and performance thanks to its USB 40 Gbps interface.
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