LaCie Rugged SSDs are Impressively Small and Fast

LaCie turns 30 this year, and I want to celebrate the company’s newest arrivals: the Rugged SSD and Rugged SSD Pro. These join a now 15-year legacy of bright orange drives that are “as tough as a basketball” and are my new favorite portable hard drives. Tiny, tough, and fast, the Rugged SSD drives are the perfect mobile drive for photographers and videographers who want to take off on nearly any adventure without worrying about whether their data will be safe.
Over the last six months, I have worked to pare down my everyday carry kit (EDC). If you follow that link, you’ll notice that I already have a LaCie Rugged RAID Pro drive in my bag. It’s still great. However, my new bag is much smaller, so I have been looking for a lightweight drive to replace it for EDC. That is why the new Rugged SSDs are perfect. They are ultra-tiny—I would describe them as a slim deck of cards—and don’t make any sacrifices when it comes to performance. Arguably, they perform better than any of my older drives.

The drives fit easily in the palm of your hand.

This performance is granted by the use of Seagate FireCuda NVMe M.2 SSDs and the latest interfaces. The standard orange Rugged SSD uses a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C connection while the Rugged SSD Pro has the even better Thunderbolt™ 3 which have transfer speeds of up to 950 MB/s and 2800 MB/s, respectively. These are box speeds, so I don’t want to promise anyone that they will hit these numbers, but the true measurements are nearly as impressive.