LaCie is a Seagate-owned brand that’s known for its rugged portable HDDs and SSDs; its Rugged Mini SSD continues to be a great choice if you want a weather-resistant chassis and fast data transfers. LaCie is setting loftier goals with its latest product, the Rugged Pro5 SSD. While the SSD looks similar in design to older models, it has Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, and is able to go up to a ridiculous 6700MB/s when reading data, and writes crossing 5300MB/s.
To put that into context, that’s at least five times faster than what most external SSDs — like the Beetle X31 and Samsung T9 — can manage. The Rugged Pro5 SSD is aimed at content creators, has a 50GB cache buffer, and enables editing 8K or 6K videos on Thunderbolt 5 devices without any slowdowns.
LaCie sells the Rugged Pro5 SSD in a 2TB variant that retails for $399, and there’s a 4TB model (the one I’m using) that costs $599. The brand includes a one-month membership to Adobe’s Creative Cloud All Apps plan when you register the drive, a $59 value — the deal is valid if you’re an existing Adobe user.
Right now, Thunderbolt 5 is limited to the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros with M4 Pro and M4 Max silicon, and the 2024 refresh of the Mac Mini with M4 Pro. I use a custom Windows gaming machine that has Thunderbolt 4 connectivity, and that’s what I used to test the drive.
I can’t do a full-fledged review of the drive at this time as I don’t have Thunderbolt 5 devices on hand, but I’m aiming to change that relatively soon, and will add synthetic scores as soon as I get the M4 Pro-based Mac Mini. With that out of the way, let’s get started.
The Rugged Pro5 SSD looks similar to earlier models, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less distinctive. If anything, the vibrant blue hue makes the drive immediately stand out, and the rugged casing — designed by noted Scottish designer Neil Poulton — allows the drive to take a beating. Seagate says the drive is usable after being driven over by a 2-ton car, and while I didn’t test that particular claim, I have no doubts about the durability of the drive.
In addition to being run over by a car, the Rugged Pro5 SSD can withstand three-meter tumbles, and it has IP68 ingress protection — the same as the best Android phones. That means the drive is immune to dust ingress, and it can be submerged in up to 1.5 meters of water up to 30 minutes without any issues.
In spite of the rugged chassis, the SSD is easily pocketable, and coming in at 150g, it doesn’t weigh much either. The drive connects over USB-C and leverages Thunderbolt 5, and LaCie includes a Thunderbolt 5 cable with the package. The cable is just 0.3m long, and it was adequate for my use case — connecting to a multitude of phones, tablets, and my Windows machine.
The Thunderbolt 5 standard has increased bandwidth going up to 80Gbps, but the drive works just as well over Thunderbolt 4’s 40Gbps, and USB-C at 40Gbps, 20Gbps, and 10Gbps. I got sequential reads of 1810MB/s and writes of 1800MB/s over Thunderbolt 4, and similar bandwidth over USB 4. Because of the cache buffer, writes go down after you cross the 50GB limit, but this makes a bigger difference over Thunderbolt 5.
The enclosed nature of the design means it gets a little warm after extended transfers, but it is in line with other external SSDs I’ve tested.
If anything, the Rugged Pro5 SSD proved to be overkill for most of my use cases, which include transferring media from phones, moving data to and from the iPad Pro and my Windows machine. It was effortless at these tasks, and I had no issues using the drive with my Honor Magic 7 Pro, ASUS Zenfone 12 Ultra, Vivo X200 Pro, and iPad Pro M4 2024.
Even though I wasn’t able to test the drive to its full potential, it is noticeably faster than any other external SSD I tested. The drive is at a premium because of the rugged design and unmatched connectivity, and if you work with 8K/6K video and have bandwidth-heavy data needs, I can’t think of another drive that’s as good.
With a rugged design and reads exceeding 6700MB/s, the Rugged Pro5 SSD is an outstanding choice. If you need the fastest SSD that money can buy today, there isn’t anything better.