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Performance Results

Comparison Products

We configured and tested the Rugged RAID Pro in all operating modes and threw it against a few devices we have reviewed in the past. We also included a few external SSDs for comparison. Powered by Thunderbolt 3, our first three competitors are the 1TB G-Technology G-Drive mobile Pro SSD, 1TB Patriot Evlvr, and 1TB Samsung X5. We also included devices with the USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface, like SanDisk’s 1TB Extreme Portable SSD and two DIY external drives that use a WD Blue SSD and HDD.

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By default, CDM tests sequential performance at a queue depth (QD) of 32. This presented a “problem” for the Rugged RAID Pro. It hit roughly 200MB/s in RAID 0, which is much lower than the rated 250MB/s. Once we switched over to a QD of 1, however, we saw performance reach near the rated performance once again. The JBOD mode also showed more performance than RAID 1 once more, averaging 10-15MB/s of faster sequential throughput.

DiskBench is a storage benchmarking tool that allows us to test the transfer or copy performance of a storage device with real data. We test external drives with three file transfers that consist of 25GB of photos (10GB of iPhone jpgs and 15GB of RAW photos from a Canon 6D), 50GB of movies, and 25GB of documents. First, we transfer each folder from a 1TB NVMe SSD to the external device; then we follow up by reading a 3.7GB 7-zip file and a 15GB movie back from the device.

With total scores ranging from 2,187 to 2,294 points and average throughput of 8MB/s, LaCie’s Rugged RAID Pro outperforms our HDD comparison drive but falls far behind the flash drives. Whether in RAID 0, RAID 1 or JBOD, application performance is still rather limited by the underlying rotating media. Flash shows its advantage with sub-millisecond access times and much faster 4K random performance.

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As a hard disk-based drive, the LaCie drive doesn’t have any SLC NAND cache to worry about, but performance does degrade as the drive fills. You can achieve upwards of 250MB/s of sequential read/write performance on the outer tracks, but after filling the drive, performance can be as low as 107MB/s in RAID 0. In RAID 1 and JBOD, performance lands around 140MB/s read/write at best, and dips to 60MB/s at worst.