LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 Review: Fastest external storage – if you’re on an M4 Pro or Max Mac

Being on the cutting edge of consumer tech is often painful. Sure, you get the best features or the fastest speed, but often with limited support or hobbled performance in other areas or on other devices. That’s LaCie’s Rugged SSD Pro5 in a nutshell. It’s the fastest external storage drive we’ve ever tested, delivering sequential read speeds close to 7,000 MB/s and reads around 5,200 MB/s – when tested on an M4 Pro-based Apple Mac Mini.

But as of this writing, seemingly the only Windows-based machine available with a Thunderbolt 5 port is Razer’s current-gen Blade 18. In testing on our new Ryzen 9000-based storage testbed with Thunderbolt 4 (via USB4), the Rugged SSD Pro5 couldn’t quite hit 4,000 MB/s reads and managed just over 3,000 MB/s writes. Plus, this LaCie drive has some pretty specific requirements, and isn’t supported at all over Thunderblot 3.

So in short, if your workflow relies solely on a current-gen Mac with Thunderbolt 5 ports and you need maximum speed for video production, the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro 5 is a great external storage option. It’s faster than any other single drive on that platform that we know of. And at $599 for the 4TB model we tested ($399 for the 2TB model), it’s priced squarely at the content creation class who need the speed this drive can provide – again, specifically over TB5.

But for Windows or mixed-platform users, USB4-based drives are available that can perform faster on more hardware and cost less, without the complex compatibility issues of this LaCie Thunderbolt 5 drive.

LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 Specifications

LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 compatibility complications

Whether your workflow exists solely within the Mac ecosystem or your devices cross over to Windows and Android devices, there is quite a bit to consider on the compatibility side with the Rugged SSD Pro5. For starters, the drive doesn’t support Thunderbolt 3 ports at all in Windows, and Windows 11 23H2 or higher is a requirement for PCs. You may need to install a LaCie Toolkit to get the drive to work via native Thunderbolt 4 ports (and even then it may be stuck at 10 Gbps). And any system with a 10Gbps or 20Gbps USB port will also need to deliver at least 15W PD to that port for the drive to work.

So much for plug-and-play. We connected this drive to a number of machines during testing, and outside of the recent Mac Mini, the experience was best described as plug-and-pray. For a full list of compatibility considerations, you can check this page at LaCie. To be fair, USB has plenty of its own issues, but we can’t remember a time in recent memory when a storage drive had such complex performance considerations that it warranted its own URL. And you should visit that URL, because there are further stipulations about iPad support and MacOS version requirements that I didn’t get into here.

Design and accessories

The familiar Neil Poulton design of the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 is in place here, although the company has chosen blue over the traditional orange. For LaCie die-hards with several drives, that will at least help the Thunderbolt 5 model stand out. And at 0.33 pounds with no discernable flex anywhere, the drive feels like a rubber-clad rock.

It’s also IP69 rated for dust and water protection, although there’s no rubber flap to protect the port when the cable isn’t plugged in. Still, while the drive feels like you could drop it out of a speeding car without major concern for its functionality, creators may put more stock in the fact that the drive comes with a 5-year warranty that includes the Seagate-owned Rescue Data Recovery. I’d still recommend regular cloud backup, though. As with most external SSDs, you’re much more likely under typical circumstances to physically lose the drive than you are to experience internal failure on the drive itself.

The only hardware accessory in the box with the drive is the Thunderbolt 5 cable, which is just over a foot long from connector to connector. This is fine for many situations, although for those who might only have a TB5 port at the back of their system, a 1.5-foot cable feels like it would have been a better choice – especially given the high price of the drive.

Comparison products

As the first Thunderbolt 5 drive we’ve tested (and one of the first TB5 drivers ever, alongside OWC’s Envoy Ultra ) the Rugged SSD Pro 5 is somewhat in a class by itself, at least in our testing pool. Its rated speeds far exceed the many USB 3.2 Gen2 2x2 drives we tested last year (which tended to top out at around 2,000 MB/s). But it just so happens that alongside the LaCie, we also received the Corsair EX400U USB4 drive. It’s “only” rated to 4,000 MB/s, but it’s also much smaller than the LaCie drive and, more importantly, costs a lot less.

To be fair, Corsair listed its drive as sold out when I wrote this, but the same was true of the LaCie drive. Our launch coverage of the Corsair drive had the 2TB model priced at $199 and the 4TB model at $359. That’s quite a bit less than the $399 2TB and $599 4TB MSRP of the LaCie drive. And as we’ll see in testing below, the LaCie drive really only excels when connected to a Thunderbolt 5 port.

Storage testbed update

Just before this review, we updated our external storage testbed to an AMD Ryzen 7600X-based machine with an Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard. This was done in part because we needed a system with native USB4 support for upcoming drives. But in fairness to LaCie, when we plugged the Rugged SSD Pro5 into our old testbed, which had Thunderbolt 4 ports via an ASRock motherboard, the LaCie drive wasn’t recognized at all. LaCie does offer a toolkit for that case, but says the drive will be stuck at 10 GBps in that scenario, so we just switched over to the new testbed.

All the drives in the charts below have been freshly re-tested on the new X870E system, with the exception of the final Iometer sustained sequential test, which is less about top speed and more about how long a drive can write before depleting any fast cache. We also updated CrystalDiskMark 8, rather than the older (and non-comparable) version 7 we were using on the previous testbed.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

We’re used to seeing in the 1,000-1,200 range on this test, even for most 20Gbps drives. LaCie’s Rugged SSD Pro more than doubles that. And at 2,586, it’s also nearly 50% ahead of Corsair’s EX400U USB4 drive on this test. That’s a fantastic start.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test real-world file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

The Rugged SSD Pro also excels in our real-world 50GB read test, at over 200 MB/s faster than the competing Corsair drive. But the Corsair drive flips the script when it comes to write speeds, with its 1,671 MB/s easily doubling the 726 MB/s showing of the LaCie drive over our Thunderbolt 4-equipped USB4 port in Windows 11.

As we’ll see shortly, we know the LaCie drive is capable of much faster speeds over Thunderbolt 5. And the bandwidth is there on our testbed for it to compete or outpace the Corsair drive. We’re not entirely sure whether native USB4 support is just better optimized than Thunderbolt on AMD’s X870E platform (which wouldn’t particularly be a surprise), or if the LaCie drive just doesn’t perform as well as you’d think over Thunderbolt 4, given its higher-bandwidth Thunderbolt 5 abilities.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

Again, the Corsair USB4 drive outpaces the LaCie drive under Windows, when limited to Thunderbolt 4, particularly on writes.

To get a sense of what the Rugged SSD Pro5 can do on a Mac with Thunderbolt 5 ports, we also tested the drive on the M4 Pro-based Mac Mini. Using AmorphousDiskMark on the Mac (CrystalDiskMark doesn’t run on Macs), we recorded sequential read speeds of 6,941.17 MB/s, and write speeds of 5,199.14 MB/s. That’s easily faster than the Corsair drive.

We also ran the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test on the M4 Mac Mini with the LaCie drive. There, the native Thunderbolt 5 performance delivered a read speed of 5,056 MB/s read speed and 4,020.2 MB/s writes. Clearly, LaCie’s drive is faster than any other external drive we’ve tested – but under Windows 11 in our storage testbed, it doesn’t perform as well as we’d expect, even accounting for that system’s Thunderbolt 4 limitations.

The LaCie drive delivers perhaps its worst showing in this test, where its write results in particular are a fraction of what we saw on the Corsair USB4 drive. The LaCie Thunderbolt 5 drive has issues either with Thunderbolt 4 performance in Windows in general, or with our newly built USB4-equipped testbed more specifically.

When plugged into my AMD-based ZenBook 14 laptop’s USB4 port, the LaCie drive failed to mount at all, much like on our older Intel-based testbed with Thunderbolt 4. So while your mileage may vary, it’s hard to recommend this drive for those whose workflows include Windows PCs.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data.

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

The bad news is that the Rugged SSD Pro5 only manages to write at its top speed Windows-based speed of around 3,200-3,300MB/s for about 15 seconds, which makes sense given the drive’s stated 50GB cache. Typically, we’d call out a drive with “pro” in its name sporting such a quickly depleted cache – 50GB is a fairly large amount, but it runs out fast at these speeds. But note that once the cache is consumed, the drive still maintains an average write speed above 1,500MB/s for the full 15 minutes of our test (actually the full 30 minutes that we typically run this test – we only chart half of it), which is better than nearly all other drives here.

That said, the Corsair USB4 drive, while it lacks the initial write speed north of 3,000MB/s, maintains a faster write speed than the LaCie for the duration of the test, typically between 1,600 and 1,700 MB/s. So while the LaCie drive indeed delivers class-leading sustained write performance, that advantage really only applies until you’ve written 50 GB. If your write workloads typically involve much larger amounts of data with no downtime for the drive’s cache to recover, the Corsair EX4000U might be the better option. Corsair’s drive did get hot during this test, though, while the LaCie was only mildly warm.

And keep in mind that our primary tests were run in Windows 11 over a USB4 / Thunderbolt 4 port. You may get better results if the only device you use is a TB5-equipped Mac or PC.

Bottom line

The LaCie Rugged SSD Pro 5 combines a tried-and-true rugged design with the fastest speeds we’ve ever seen on an external SSD – when tested on a Thunderbolt 5-equipped Mac. It also ships with a five-year warranty that includes its parent company’s data recovery service. That’s enough to make this drive easy to recommend for Mac users – particularly those who only or primarily use current-gen Mac hardware and need the fastest possible performance for media creation or other write-heavy purposes.

For everyone else though – including Mac owners who still use older hardware, or those who also need to move data around on Windows-based machines, Corsair’s EX4000U delivers fewer compatibility complications and generally faster speed in Windows. It also costs less – that’s assuming you can find either of these drives in stock.

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