The LaCie Rugged Mini Portable SSD is the first launch for the company in a while; we’re happy it’s here, with great design and performance.

It’s been a while since Seagate released a LaCie product, so there was excitement surrounding the professional community when the LaCie Rugged Mini Portable SSD was announced. Seagate ensured that it would be a great start to a new year for its customers, with the product’s release date of January 3rd, 2024.

We reviewed the previous LaCie Rugged SSD back in 2020. Long story short, we liked the SSD’s capabilities and found it easy to recommend. Technology has continued to advance rapidly these last few years, making the 1050MB/s read the portable SSD claimed seem mid by today’s standards. The updated LaCie Rugged SSD we are reviewing today has a claimed read speed of 2000MB/s, quite the advancement.

Since LaCie is Seagate’s premium brand, it’s no surprise that the portable SSD has more to it than some impressive read speeds. The SSD supports up to a USB 3.2 gen 2×2 interface. It should work with everything that has a USB-C port, although will revert to 10Gb/s or slower speeds depending on what the actual interface is. The device has out-of-box compatibility with Windows, macOS, and iPadOS, with a LaCie toolkit software for on-demand backup.

Another plus is that the SSD contains at least 30% post-consumer recycled materials by weight. The SSD is IP54-rated for dust and rain resistance. It also offers 3-meter drop protection and 1-ton car pressure resistance. We considered adding a 1-ton car pressure resistance benchmark to our testing but quickly concluded this might not be the best idea for a few good reasons.

The LaCie Rugged Mini Portable SSD has a lot of different capacities to choose from. Seagate set retail prices (affiliate link) as $79.99 (500GB), $119.99 (1TB), $189.99 (2TB), and US$349.99 (4TB). The SSD has a 3-year limited warranty and Seagate’s rescue data recovery services 3. One purchase comes with one month of Adobe Creative Cloud services. Take a look at the information below for a summed-up version of the specifications.

LaCie Rugged Mini Portable SSD Specifications

LaCie Rugged Mini Portable SSD Design & Build

The LaCie rugged SSD features an orange rubber sleeve to protect the drive against the elements. This is the same iconic casing the previous generation of this SSD came in, and the ones before it as well. The sleeve is great for professionals on the go, who may need to throw multiple SSDs in a bag together. It’s also a nice addition for everyone else as well, having some extra protection is never a bad thing.

There is an extra rubber piece that can be attached to the rest of the casing to protect the port. We aren’t exactly sure why this isn’t connected to the rest of the case for ease of use, we assume most people will just throw these away or lose the cover pretty quickly.

The Lacie Rugged SSD has one USB-C port. The drive comes with one matching orange USB-C cable with the potential to deliver 2GB/s and 240W. High-quality USB-C cables generally have their capabilities listed on the cable, which is exactly the case for the one we were provided.

LaCie Rugged Mini Portable SSD Performance

For our review, we tested the drive using our Lenovo ThinkStation P520 Workstation. We will compare the LaCie Rugged Mini Portable SSD to the following SSDs we have reviewed in the past:

• Crucial X10 Pro SSD   
• ADATA SE880 SSD
• 2020 LaCie Rugged SSD

The USB 3.2 Gen2x2 SSD market has fierce competition. Some of these include the ADATA SE880 and the Crucial X10 Pro, which we have included for comparison in our analysis. We also included the 2020 LaCie Rugged SSD, so we can compare how the newer model improves on the older one.

The Blackmagic test is up first as always. The LaCie Rugged Mini Portable SSD recorded speeds of 1592MB/s write and 1764.7MB/s read. This does not come all that close to 2000MB/s read, but keep in mind the Blackmagic testing is single-threaded, so it won’t push the SSD to its full potential.

Here is how the LaCie SSD compares to the others. The LaCie Rugged Mini is on par for both read and write, even coming first in the read category. In terms of performance, it blows the previous LaCie drive out of the water.

Next up are the IOMeter tests. Like the Blackmagic test, this next test is also one thread. The LaCie Rugged Mini did super well in this test. It came first in every category except the random 4k read section. Some of its positive performance gaps were by a surprisingly notable margin.

When upped to 4-threads (which puts a heavier workload on the SSDs), the results were very close to what Seagate quoted. Seagate quoted the SSD as being able to reach up to 2000MB/s, and the sequential 2MB reads reached 1996.77MB/s, which is just a little over 3MB/s under this figure. The SSD dominated once again and came first in every category except the IOPS counts.

We also decided to conduct one more test on an M2 silicon MacBook Pro, a device that doesn’t support USB 3.2 2×2. As can be seen, the drive comes in way below the rated performance over Thunderbolt.

Our Thoughts on the LaCie Rugged Mini Portable SSD

The LaCie Rugged Mini Portable SSD lived up to the expectations that Seagate consumers had. It had the overall best performance when compared to similar SSDs in the industry. It also carries forward classic LaCie design and durability.

Normally when we do our reviews on the portable SSD market we do not see that much of a performance gap between the competitors. In this case, there is a notable performance increase, especially in our IOmeter 1 thread testing. The performance gap isn’t huge, but it’s enough for professionals to consider buying this drive over others.

Price is another important factor when choosing your ideal portable SSD. Below is the current pricing on the list of drives.

• LaCie will be released to stores on January 3rd, 2024 (affilaite links)
• Crucial X10 Pro on Amazon
• ADATA SE880 on Amazon 

Overall, we were very happy with how the drive performed. If you are a creator or professional interested in getting the best possible performance you can (short of Thunderbolt), then this is a drive to consider. The SSD will be pricy at launch but should drop closer to that of competitors in a few months. Before buying, ensure that your device has USB 3.2 2×2 support, otherwise, speeds will be much slower than expected.

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