LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 boasts Thunderbolt 5 speeds up to 7GB/s, IP68 durability, and even survived being run over by a car.

The LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 is the latest in the company’s lineup of portable SSDs. The Pro5 has the distinction among their rugged SSDs of being LaCie’s first Thunderbolt 5 device, with claimed speeds approaching 7GB/s read and over 5GB/s write. There’s an asterisk attached to that, which we will discuss in the performance section, but on paper, this drive offers a lot in a small package. It also lives up to the “rugged” name with its IP68 rating, offering maximum ingress protection from dust and water and the ability to survive literally being run over by a car.

LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 Specifications

Below are the speeds and feeds for this drive, but we wanted to offer some interesting points on the Thunderbolt 5 spec here. LaCie doesn’t guarantee backward compatibility with the new standard, but for all intents and purposes, most systems since 2018 should have no problem. Of course, only the latest Thunderbolt 5 systems will be able to utilize the speed, but as we’ll discuss in the performance section, the drive is still extremely fast on Thunderbolt 4 systems.

In our testing, the drive worked fine in both Windows and macOS using a USB-C cable and a Thunderbolt cable, with performance limited to the type of cable used, as expected. The drive would randomly disconnect when using a USB-A port, but this is expected behavior, and LaCie flat-out says USB-A is incompatible. For more information, Seagate has a detailed support page on compatibility, which is worth a look if you have an older system. The LaCie Toolkit app also allows the drive to be put in a compatibility mode if needed, which limits the drive to 10Gbps.

LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 Design and Build

The LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 follows a similar design language as the rest of its lineup, with the classic “design by neil poulton” debossed in the rubber outer shell. A stark departure from the usual orange, the Pro5 is a pleasant blue, with the LaCie logo on one side and the product and compliance information on the other. It also just feels nice in the hands. It’s not heavy (150g), but it feels substantial and has absolutely no flex if you push on the shell.

As we mentioned in the introduction, the drive has an IP68 rating and a 3m drop resistance. In practice, it has complete dust protection and can survive being submerged in water indefinitely. LaCie also literally ran it over with a car and claims it can withstand pressure from a 2-ton vehicle and still function; pretty rugged indeed!

This drive’s durability comes at the expense of its non-existent repairability. There is no way to get inside the drive non-destructively. However, LaCie claims the drive is built with at least 45% recycled materials, which is nice. We also like that the packaging includes a Thunderbolt 5 cable. The lack of repairability is also eased by a 5-year limited warranty with Rescue Data Recovery Services included.

Performance

Let’s examine performance; simply put, this drive is fast. Unfortunately, we do not have a Thunderbolt 5 system to test this correctly, but the performance is still top-tier for most of us working on Thunderbolt 3 and 4 systems. The following tests were performed on a 16″ M1 Max MacBook Pro (Thunderbolt 4, macOS 13.7.3).

The Blackmagic Disk Speed Test is over and done before you have time to blink. We got a consistent ~2,958 MB/s write and ~3,085 MB/s read. The Blackmagic test lacks the queue depth to truly stress the drive, but it’s a decent indicator of the lower bounds of real-world performance.

In the ATTO Disk Benchmark, we can see the drive really shine, and the apparent bottleneck using only Thunderbolt 4. We saw 3,723 MB/s read and 3,279 MB/s write on the high end. This ostensibly saturates the 40Gb/s Thunderbolt 4 offers when accounting for overhead and the 8Gb/s reserved for DisplayPort. For Thunderbolt 5 performance, LaCie advertises up to 6,700 MB/s read and 5,300 MB/s write. However, specific test data indicated reads exceeding 7,000 MB/s in some scenarios. We have no reason to believe an end-user wouldn’t see those numbers in real-world use.

A unique and interesting thing we want to emphasize is that LaCie advertises the amount of cache this drive has, which is 50GB. What this means is the first 50GB written will be at full speed, after which they claim sustained writes will be about 1,400 MB/s on the 2TB and 1,800 MB/s on the 4TB model, while read speeds remain unaffected (our tests showed these figures to be accurate). In our experience, most commercially available drives have some limiting factor that affects speed, whether that’s something like an SLC cache or thermal limitations of their enclosures. It’s nice to see LaCie be upfront about this limitation; it lets you, the end user, have realistic expectations.

That said, 1,400 MB/s (1,800 MB/s on the 4TB) is still nothing to sneeze at, and in real-world use cases where you may be offloading media from a camera, the media is generally the limiting factor. The reads remain unaffected, so the proposed use-case of editing high-bitrate footage can be done for as long as you want. Unfortunately, we could not determine precisely how long that 50GB cache takes to flush, but after 5-10 minutes, we seemed to get full performance back.

Conclusion

The LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 is an excellent drive with top-tier performance. While Thunderbolt 5 is not widespread at the time of review, this drive still performs well on Thunderbolt 4 systems, where the limiting factor is simply the interface speed. The drive is available now with an MSRP of $399.99 for the 2TB model and $599.99 for the 4TB model, though at the time of writing, a few online retailers have it listed for $329.99 and $529.99, respectively. It’s certainly not cheap, and you can get quality portable 4TB SSDs for literally half the price, but the Pro5 prices are comparable to the other Thunderbolt 5 drives currently on the market (or drives that are coming soon).

If you absolutely need crazy fast speeds and have a Thunderbolt 5 capable system, there is a premium to pay, but consider it an early adopter tax. Patience will certainly pay as Thunderbolt 5 becomes more widely available, and we can expect more competition to drive down prices, but there are few options at the time of writing. That said, if you’re in the market for a drive like this to put your new Thunderbolt 5 system to the test, the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 is a solid choice.

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