LaCie Rugged RAID (4TB)
LaCie Rugged RAID (4TB
The Rugged RAID hard drive looks a lot like its predecessor, the LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt (500GB SSD). It has the same silver, matte-aluminum body that’s ringed by a bright, orange-colored bumper for extra drop protection. As before, the Thunderbolt cable is permanently attached, so you can’t lose it.
The cable stores away in the bumper, which has a recess in the back of the drive for the Thunderbolt connector. A detachable USB 3.0 cable is also included, and it plugs into a USB 3.0 port located in the same recess. The drive is bus-powered through the Thunderbolt cable, but it comes with an external AC adapter for when you use the USB port.
A removable rubber cap protects the ports against blowing dust and rain. The drive is rated for a 4.9-foot drop, so it could fall off the back of a truck into a rock-filled sand dune and still expect it to work fine.
Measuring about 1.3 by 3.75 by 6 inches (HWD) and weighing just over 1.2 pounds, the drive is not quite pocket-size, but it will fit in your travel bag easily. It’s 0.3 inches thicker and about double the weight of the LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt, and it’s thinner and lighter than the Western Digital My Passport Pro, which has the same 4TB capacity.
If you’re willing to forgo the rugged aspect, then the Seagate Backup Plus Fast, our Editors’ Choice portable external hard drive, is slimmer yet. The drive has a 4TB overall capacity, thanks to its two 2TB drives connected in a hardware RAID 0 array for speed. This is more robust than a software RAID, which would require software driver or operating system support.
You can easily switch configurations to a RAID 1 mirrored drive for better data retention, but at the expense of 50 percent of the overall drive space. In RAID 1 mode, all of your data is copied to both drives, as insurance in case one of the internal drive mechanisms goes bad. The WD My Passport Pro has a similar setup, but the Seagate Backup Plus Fast only has a single 4TB drive mechanism. The drive comes with a three-year warranty.
When you first connect the Rugged RAID to your PC or Mac, it will prompt you to run the LaCie Setup utility, which partitions the drive and gives you the option of installing backup software. We used the utility to format the drive as 1TB FAT32 for use with both Macs and PCs, with the remaining storage as a separate 3TB HFS+ partition for use solely on a Mac.
You can of course reformat the drive using utilities built into OS X or Windows. LaCie’s Backup Assistant software is included, but you can skip it and use the drive with Time Machine on the Mac or the File History utility included with Windows 8.1.
The Rugged RAID performed well on the AJA system test, with a throughput of 252MBps read and 239MBps write using the Thunderbolt interface, and 218MBps read and 258MBps write using USB 3.0. The drive’s Blackmagic disk test results were similar: 227MBps read and 245MBps write on Thunderbolt; and 246MBps read and 245MBps write on USB 3.0.
The SSD in the LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt was much quicker on the Blackmagic disk speed test: 382MBps read and 347MBps write using the Thunderbolt interface, and an equally astounding 430MBps read and 393MBps write on the USB 3.0 interface. The Western Digital My Passport Pro brought up the rear, where it scored 211MBps read and 205MBps write using Thunderbolt on the same test.
Essentially, the Rugged RAID trades a little bit of overall performance for a much larger capacity. If you carry a lot of videos or raw photos around, that’s a very good compromise.
At a list price of $419.99, the Rugged RAID rings up at about 10 cents per gigabyte, which is a lot less than the $1 per gigabyte of the LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt, and comparable in value to the WD My Passport Pro (11 cents per gigabyte). That said, all three pale in comparison to the Seagate Backup Plus Fast at 6 cents per gigabyte.
Thus, the LaCie Rugged RAID is a very good choice if you need to carry a lot of data on the (rough) road. It’s spacious, fast, and is a decent value. However, the LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt (500GB SSD) remains our Editors’ Choice for rugged external drives, due to its slimmer case, stronger shock resistance, and faster overall performance.
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