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We have in our hot little hands the latest and greatest LaCie Rugged SSD4 and I am personally thinking this SSD may have been made just for me. My true love in life is wildlife photography and I have found myself in just about every weather condition and situations many would never. And yes I have been up a tree typing away on my ultra with my Canon EOS R5 and RF100-500 lens in hand and had some nosy bear staring me down from what what is typically a 15 yard jaunt if that bruin decides. No cages to keep one away from that close-up encounter in Muskoka.
The LaCie Rugged SSD4 is a 40Gbps portable SSD that is fully compatible with ThunderBolt 5/4/3 and USB4/3.2/3/2 devices to include PC, Mac, IPhone and Android. It is palm-sized, measures only 105mm x 67mm x 18mm, and weighs in at only 110 grams.
The Rugged SSD4 is available in 1,2 and 4TB capacities and will attain speeds of 4000MB/s read and 3800MB/s write, if one has a fully compatible device. We mention this because there are PCs and motherboards that are listed as Thunderbolt4/USB4 but are actually only USB 3.2 and will not achieve full performance variables. Ensure your equipment is compatible.
The Rugged SSD4 is constructed of a one piece machined aluminum shell with a 40Gbps Type-C port and activity LED on one end. The outershell is of an orange silicon with a separate cover to protect the USB-C port.
This device is IP54 rated which means it is ‘I’ngress ‘P’rotected from dust (5) and water(4). It can also withstand drops from as high as 3 metres and 1000lb pressure. Quite frankly from the feel of the Rugged SSD4, a tank could run this over and not damage it.
The LaCie Rugged SSD4 comes with a 12″ orange 40Gbps cable, this being another pertinent point to ensure if you happen to have a million cables as I. In order to achieve full performance, one needs the included cable in a compatible system or a similar 40Gbps cable. Over the years, we have assisted many who simply were using an improper cable not capable of passing data at 40Gbps. Let’s check out some speeds.
ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.
This is perhaps the best result one might see from a benchmark where the speed steadily increases as the data size increases. It is also a very strong result through USB 4.0.
CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 8.0.4 x64
Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of random data which is, for the most part, incompressible. Performance is virtually identical, regardless of data sample so we have included only that using random data samples.
THROUGHPUT
Once again, the LaCie Rugged SSD4 displays excellent 40Gbps speeds. Checking Amazon, we are not seeing this specific device on Amazon just yet but MSRP is listed at $134.99 (1TB), $249.99 (2TB) and $479.99 (4TB). A word to the wise when looking for this Rugged SSD4, confirm that the product number is STND2000400 as the previous versions have the exact same look and can be deceiving when purchasing.
Being as this is a LaCie product and built to exceed the norm, the price tag on the Rugged SSD4 is a bit of a premium but the data protection and data transfer speeds one gets in return is worth the price. With this package also comes a 2-month Adobe Cloud Pro membership, 3-year warranty and Rescue Data Recovery Service if needed. Perhaps the only thing we see that could have been improved on this device is the Type-C cap which could have been attached somehow. I can definitely see that falling 15 feet down to the ground from my treestand. Lucky it is hunter orange and easily seen!
CHECK AMAZON FOR LACIE RUGGED SSD4 PRICING
