Lacie Rugged Raid Shuttle Review

The Lacie Rugged Raid Shuttle is a portable RAID that is the first of its kind, utilizing Seagate Secure encryption for a consumer RAID product. Whether looking for data redundancy, performance improvement, or both the Lacie Rugged Raid Shuttle is a tough, easy to use, secure, and easily carried gadget for creative professionals. Wherever your next project takes you this drive is ready to be packed into your gear bag or a shipping envelope and go.

The Lacie Rugged Raid Shuttle is a portable RAID that is the first of its kind, utilizing Seagate Secure encryption for a consumer RAID product. Whether looking for data redundancy, performance improvement, or both the Lacie Rugged Raid Shuttle is a tough, easy to use, secure, and easily carried gadget for creative professionals. Wherever your next project takes you this drive is ready to be packed into your gear bag or a shipping envelope and go.

Setting up the Raid Shuttle is easy, essentially just plug and play. The LaCie toolkit software suite is a one stop shop to set up everything. From the toolkit you can manage security, set up mirror folders, optimize disk performance, manage RAID, and more. I was able to find and download a user manual for the Raid Shuttle on Lacie’s website.

The drive has an 8TB capacity and can be picked up for around $500. It comes with a 3 year limited warranty and data recovery services.

Lacie Rugged Raid Shuttle Specifications

Lacie Rugged Raid Shuttle Design & Build

When taking a look at the design and build some new innovations and unique aspects can be found along with a universal appeal. On the inside the Lacie Rugged Raid Shuttle contains two 4TB 2.5-inch hard drives. The drives are arranged horizontally which allows for better heat dissipation; this creates a slim tablet like profile on the outside. The drive also features a rugged design from Neil Poulton, with drop, shock, water and dust resistance. It has a drop rating of 4 feet and a crush resistance up to 1 ton.

The enclosure itself is silver with the Lacie logo on both the top and bottom and the iconic bright orange removable silicone bumper around the edges. On the top long edge there is a crevice in the bumper with a hole cutout for the USB port, to the right there is a tab which covers the power supply connection, and to the left there is an LED which lights up when the device is connected and receiving power.

For universal compatibility the Lacie Rugged Raid Shuttle offers the latest USB-C connector and two cables USB-C and USB-A to connect to all modern computers. Additionally, the Rugged RAID Shuttle is delivered formatted in exFAT for compatibility with both Windows and Mac computers. While universal compatibility is nice users can also customize the drive to optimize performance. RAID 0/1 lets the user control capacity/speed versus redundancy. The drive can also be reformatted to match the native file system of the user’s machine.

Lacie Rugged Raid Shuttle Management 

The LaCie Toolkit Software Suite is the management system for the Rugged RAID Shuttle. Toolkit helps you get the most out of your storage with an easy to navigate user interface. Notable functions of the toolkit include automated backups, performance optimization with quick reformatting, security management, and RAID management.

Create mirror folders on your drive that sync with your computer so files are always available. Setting up security allows you to password-protect your device using Seagate Secure 256-bit encryption, lock/unlock the device, and crypto-erase the drive among other things. With toolkit optimization you can optimize file copy performance by formatting the drive in the native file system for your operating system. RAID Manager helps you configure and manage arrays, set up important email alerts, measure the health of hard drives, along with providing updates.

Device Settings in the Raid Manager shows the device name, with additional device details, and a device registration link.

Here in the LaCie RAID Manager at the top the current configuration of the device is shown. Additionally, to modify the RAID level all it takes is the click of a button selecting the configuration of your preference depending on which storage attributes are most important to you.

Performance

To test the performance of the Lacie Rugged Raid Shuttle we used the BlackMagic disk speed test on a current generation MacBook Air as well as an HP ZBook Studio x360 G5 for Windows testing. The Raid Shuttle was in the factory default RAID level of RAID0 during testing.

For BlackMagic the drive was able to hit 235.1MB/s read and 210.8MB/s write, slightly under its advertised claims.

For IOMeter the Lacie Rugged Raid Shuttle was able to hit 245.4MB/s read and 241.2MB/s write in our 2MB sequential. Our 2MB random test results showed 28.9MB/s read and 89.5MB/s write. Looking at random 4K throughput, the drive hit 96.7 IOPS read and 1104.9 IOPS write.

Conclusion

The Lacie Rugged Raid Shuttle is a new product that offers RAID desktop storage with the same ease of use as a traditional external hard drive. It is an extremely durable, high capacity, universally compatible solution for transporting large data files. The toughness of the design is essentially life proofed with drop, shock, water and dust resistance. There’s not much you have to worry about with this device. Using the provided USB cords the drive can be bus powered and transfer data up to 250MB/s. The drive comes in an 8TB capacity.

Looking at the performance the LaCie Rugged Raid Shuttle left a little bit to be desired. For BlackMagic it hit 235.1 MB/s read and 210.8 MB/s write. For IOMeter it hit 2MB scores of 245.4MB/s read and 241.2MB/s write in sequential and 28.9MB/s read and 89.5MB/s write in random. For 4K throughput the drive had scores of 96.7 IOPS read and 1104.9 IOPS write.

Overall the Rugged Raid Shuttle is a welcome addition ot the fleet of orange-bumpered devices Lacie offers creative professionals.

Lacie Rugged Raid Shuttle on Amazon

Discuss this review

Sign up for the StorageReview newsletter