Introduction
LaCie Rugged SSD4 2 TB is the latest in the long line of LaCie Rugged family of portable hard drives and SSDs that come in various shapes and sizes. This drive features an iconic design by Neil Poulton that dates all the way back to 2005. The original LaCie Rugged was a portable HDD that offered the promise of some degree of drop-resistance, a big selling point for HDDs. Over the years, the product saw an evolution to smaller form-factors of HDDs, then to SATA SSDs, and finally to the current modern NVMe SSD. The drive’s interfaces 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 contemporary portable storage solution with up to 4 GB/s sequential transfer speeds on offer. Every USB4 or Thunderbolt portable SSD we’ve come across so far have been enclosures with M.2 NVMe internal SSDs that used bridge chips. LaCie is among the first to implement a USB4-native SSD controller, the Phison U21, which is the world’s first controller of its kind. This allowed LaCie to create a drive that’s much smaller than it would typically be for the kind of performance on offer. The drive is designed to run cooler than its peers since there’s only one logic chip in the entire drive.
There have been subtle variations to Neil Poulton’s LaCie Rugged original design over the years, such as captive cables. This isn’t the case with the Rugged SSD4, it features a detachable cap that covers its USB-C port. The actual drive has a hard, brushed aluminium body with hard gasketted ABS panels on two sides; and a 2 mm-thick silicone sleeve that fits just right, not too tight. The drive can take loads of up to 1,000 kg (can be run over by a car), can survive drops of at least 3 meters, and comes with IP54-rated water resistance with its cap closed.
LaCie comes from the house of Seagate, a titan in the storage industry, and the company includes some lavish product and service additions with the Rugged SSD4. First up, you get three years of complimentary Seagate Rescue data recovery services, where you can send the drive to Seagate so they can attempt to recover lost data for you. You also get a compact but functional data backup and mirroring software. Sweetening the deal is a complimentary 2-month subscription of Adobe Creative Cloud Pro, valued at $140. You normally only get 7-day trials, so this is quite something.
We’ve seen USB4-class portable SSDs and enclosures banking on drive durability as a selling point weigh in excess of 250 g, not very portable if you want to carry them around in a pocket. Not only is the LaCie Rugged SSD4 fanless, but it also weighs in at just under 109 g, or about the weight of an enclosure that uses fan-based active cooling. With this drive, you get the best of both worlds—low weight and no noise.
When we began testing the drive, its last recorded price from Seagate’s first-party online store was $330 for the 2 TB model we are reviewing here. These prices are extremely fluid given the acute shortage of NAND flash memory, and we will update the review with the latest prices as soon as we have them.
LaCie Rugged SSD4 2 TB Portable SSDBrand:SeagateModel:LaCie Rugged SSD4 2 TBCapacity:2000 GBController:Phison PS2251-21 (U21)Flash:Kioxia BiCS6 162-layer 3D TLC NAND
Model: T27HGA5A1V, 4× 4 TbitDimensions:105.3 mm × 66.8 mm × 17.3 mm (D×W×H)Weight:108 g (3.8 oz)Interface:USB4 and Thunderbolt 4, 40 GbpsInternal SSD Interface:Fully integrated single chip solutionWarranty:Three yearsPrice at Time
of Review:$330