LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 2TB External SSD – TB5, speeds 6700/5300MB/s (STNA2000400)

This review is for the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro 1TB Solid State Drive — USB-C Thunderbolt 3. I'm using it as an external SSD for a Mac Mini w/ Thunderbolt 3. It comes formatted in exFAT which works on both Mac and PCs but it will be dedicated to a Mac Mini so it's best formatted as APFS for best speed. It took about 1sec to do that. It copied a movie file of 70 GB from the internal SSD in less than 10 sec. To do an encrypted Time Machine backup of the entire 256 GB SSD internal storage it took less than 15 mins. It's blazing fast and I'm impressed. Small enough to fit in a shirt pocket and super light. Unless I have a problem and need to come back to update this review it stands as it is.

Was in the market for an external HDD Hard drive and stumbled upon this pup and decided to spend the extra money and go with and SSD. Glad I did. I am using this to store extended sound libraries from some Logic Pro X and other third party sound libraries. Pros 1) Extremely small and light weight. Fits in the palm of my hand 2) Has the same LaCie Durability that their HDD Hard Drives have 3) Incredibly fast. It took about 20 minutes to download 80% of extended Logic Pro X sound library onto this little thing. 4) The connection when using the external sound libraries with the program is seamless. No delays in connection. Cons 1) The mini thunder bolt 3 (USBC) cord they give you is small and very sensitive so if you're moving the computer around at all, the connection will get cut. Something to keep in mind if you're outdoors and using this for photography. 2) Can heat up rather quickly if its being used for an extended period of time. I am currently using it in the winter time in a cooler room, so i'm not overly concerned about it now.

Compact and fast data exchange

Super rugged and compact! I have transferred about 2TB of data as a backup and the speed is fast and efficient. So far, no issues. BONUS... this SSD is WAY smaller than anticipated which is great for traveling and portability. Wish it came in other colors for project identification, but will buy again.

This SSD works GREAT in my iMac, super fast. Backed up my HDD backups. But... my iPad Pro 2024 M4 13 inch doesn't read it. It's formatted correctly and nothing happens. That's the reason for the 4/5 stars. Looking into the SAMSUNG T9 external SSD for portability. The reviews say it's compatible. We'll see.

These drives are hand-down awful. They are advertised as working on Windows or Mac which is not true. To work on Windows, you have to download complex software, and even then it doesn't work. Freezes up, is terribly slow. Way, way slower than any USB 4 port should be. I have very high end Dell Precision 7680, on which any drive should work fine and these do now. If you have only a Macbook, they may be okay, not sure. But if you plan to use them at all on Windows, just recognize they will not work, and the company's claim that they will is just false.

Honestly thing is great but unless you REALLY need to have the full bandwidth speed this provides on a portable level. It’s not worth the $$. I’m kicking myself because I just bought an OWC Thunderblade which has 4x the capacity at a little over 2x the $$ but i don’t NEED that much speed on the go. I’ve got 5 or 6 Sandisk Extreme SSDs and one of the Extreme Pro, which can get about half this speed and frankly, that’s enough for my use case. But, I guess we’ll see, once I start really shooting 8k regularly this might be them norm but for now, I can’t see myself pushing this thing to the limits. But there is the benefit of speeding up my card dumps but once again... that’s not something I NEEDED. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Otherwise it’s solid, its tiny and I really like that it comes with a 5 year data recovery plan.

The product is reliable. I have found Thunderbolt and USB-C drives that are much cheaper but have problems with disconnects. Sometimes it is when the drive gets hot but I have seen it with idle drives too. The LaCie Rugged drives are plugged in 24/7 and when under heavy use it stays working. I know that sustained high usage that performance can go down but that is an issue with all solid state drives. I still will buy the cheaper drives when I need a temporary storage drive but for data that matters, I will only use this LaCie Rugged drive. Waiting for a price drop for my next purchase but I feel like it will never happen.