LaCie Rugged SSD4 2 TB Portable SSD Review – Iconic Design, Now Faster

Introduction

The LaCie Rugged SSD4 2 TB is the latest in a long line of LaCie Rugged family of portable hard drives and SSDs that come in a variety of shapes and sizes. This drive features Neil Poulton’s iconic design dating back to 2005. The original LaCie Rugged was a portable HDD that offered the promise of a certain level of durability, a major selling point for HDDs. Over the years, the brand saw the evolution of smaller HDDs, then SATA SSDs, and finally the current NVMe SSD. Drive connectivity has kept pace with what was inside—from USB 2.0 to USB 3.0, then 10 Gbps and 20 Gbps USB 3.2, and now finally 40 Gbps USB4.

In its latest avatar, the Rugged SSD4, LaCie offers a fast, durable, and modern storage solution with sequential transfer speeds of up to 4 GB/s. Every USB4 or Thunderbolt SSD we’ve come across so far has been an enclosure with internal M.2 NVMe SSDs that used bridge chips. LaCie is among the first to use a native USB4 SSD controller, the Phison U21, which is the world’s first controller of its kind. This allowed LaCie to create a drive that was much smaller than it would have been for the type of performance it offered. The drive is designed to run cooler than its peers as there is only one logic chip in every drive.

There have been some subtle variations on the original design of Neil Poulton’s LaCie Rugged over the years, such as the cable grips. This is not the case with the Rugged SSD4, which features a removable cap that covers the USB-C port. The original drive has a solid aluminum body, mixed with ABS panels that are hard gasketed on two sides; and a 2 mm thick silicone sleeve for a perfect fit, not too tight. The drive can take loads of up to 1,000 kg (not run over by a car), can survive a 3 meter drop, and comes with IP54 rated water resistance with its lid closed.

LaCie comes from the house of Seagate, a titan in the storage industry, and the company combines luxury products and service add-ons with the Rugged SSD4. First, you get three years of Seagate Rescue data recovery services, where you can send the drive to Seagate to try to recover the lost data. You also get compact but functional data backup and display software. Sweetening the deal is a 2-month subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud Pro, which costs $140. You usually only get 7 day trials, so this is quite a deal.

We have seen portable SSDs in the USB4 class and banking places on strengthening the drive as a point of sale weighing more than 250 g, it is not very portable if you want to carry it in a pocket. Not only is the LaCie Rugged SSD4 fanless, but it also weighs less than 109 g, or about the weight of an enclosure that uses fan-based cooling. With this drive, you get the best of both worlds—low weight and no noise.

When we first tested the drive, its last recorded price from Seagate’s original online store was $330 for the 2 TB model we’re reviewing here. These prices are extremely fluid given the huge shortage of NAND flash memory, and we will update the update with the latest prices as soon as we have them.