LaCie Review: Hands-On With the 4TB Rugged RAID Thunderbolt Hard Drive

MacRumors · Apr 6, 2015

LaCie's new 4TB Rugged RAID Thunderbolt hard drive, first announced during CES, is the company's latest product in its iconic Rugged collection. Like all of the Rugged products from LaCie, the Rugged RAID is encased in a bright orange rubber for maximum protection.

LaCie is calling its $419.99 Rugged RAID the one of the fastest HDs available on the market, with upload speeds that reach 240MB/s. It includes two 2TB hard drives with RAID 0/1 options to optimize for speed or data security, plus an integrated Thunderbolt cable.

The Rugged RAID Thunderbolt hard drive is available for purchase from LaCie.com beginning today, and ahead of the release, we went hands-on with it to give MacRumors readers a look at its design, speed, and features.

What's in the Box?

The LaCie Rugged RAID ships with the 4TB hard drive itself, which includes a protective orange rubber cover, a spare port cover, a quick start guide, a USB cable, and a power adapter for use when the hard drive is plugged in via USB 3.0. There are also several plug adapters to accommodate travelers.

With Thunderbolt, the Rugged RAID is bus-powered and does not require the power adapter to function.

Design and Features

For a 4TB hard drive that's also shock, dust, and water resistant, the LaCie Rugged RAID is impressively portable. It's not that much bigger than LaCie's existing Rugged hard drives, measuring in at 1.3 x 3.6 x 5.8 inches and weighing 1.2 pounds. At that size, it fits into a purse, bag, backpack, or suitcase for travel.

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Article Link: LaCie Review: Hands-On With the 4TB Rugged RAID Thunderbolt Hard Drive

sp3k0psv3t · Apr 6, 2015

Great drive.....

But super pricey!

ArtOfWarfare · Apr 6, 2015

MacRumors said:
the Rugged RAID is encased in a bright orange rubber for maximum protection.

Everyone knows that bright orange is the most protective color. Were the case made of gray rubber it wouldn't be anywhere near as well protected.

jclo · Apr 6, 2015

ArtOfWarfare said:
Everyone knows that bright orange is the most protective color. We're the case made of gray rubber it wouldn't be anywhere near as well protected.

Obviously. See, if it were in the middle of the road, you'd spot it in its bright orange casing so you could swerve to avoid it with your car. If it were gray, well, you'd drive right over it.

5t3f4n · Apr 6, 2015

MacRumors said:
the hard drive comes sheathed in a protective rubber sleeve that's an attractive shade of bright orange

>bright orange
>attractive

bryanzak · Apr 6, 2015

Terrible Connectors

These drives have poor USB and Thunderbolt port connectors. They very quickly "wear out" to the point that when using the drive if you even barely bump it the cable will come unplugged and of course your drive is forcibly ejected.

And it's not just one drive. I work for a school district and we purchased a lot of these and months later many (most? all?) of them are having problems with loose connections.

The Thunderbolt connection was particularly flaky with the drive ejecting for no apparent reason at all. This happened so often that I stopped using it in favor of the USB3 port.

Bottom line: I would never buy one of these personally.

cycledance · Apr 6, 2015

id gladly give up my 2 thunderbolt ports for a single usb3 port. never will i buy those crazy overpriced thunderbolt devices. i hope apple will completely eradicate thunderbolt in all their future macs for usb 3.1.

ChromeAce · Apr 6, 2015

I'd rather just buy the rugged orange rubber housing and put my own drive in it. I would never use dual-RAID. If one drive fails you lose all your data and that's twice as likely in a dual-RAID setup.

mgmusicman94 · Apr 6, 2015

cycledance said:
id gladly give up my 2 thunderbolt ports for a single usb3 port. never will i buy those crazy overpriced thunderbolt devices. i hope apple will completely eradicate thunderbolt in all their future macs for usb 3.1.

I don't see that happening anytime soon.

gpat · Apr 6, 2015

How is LaCie still in business? Their quality for price ratio is so low, I can't see anybody buying their products more than once.

cycledance · Apr 6, 2015

mgmusicman94 said:
I don't see that happening anytime soon.

the new macbook won´t have thunderbolt. and its coming in 4 days.

2457282 · Apr 6, 2015

I have two or maybe three external hard drives sitting in a drawer collecting dust. I have a network drive at home for backups and almost everything is also in my icloud drive (trying to consolidate off of dropbox). I see the whole external drive market drying up, or maybe its just me.

windywalks · Apr 6, 2015

I'd certainly jump for this as I'm looking for a fast and reliable external storage solution that would be capable of holding the contents of my 4 external drives of various capacities, but seeing as the internal drives are probably all Seagate since, as I recall, they bought out Lacie I'm not so convinced.

I have one Neil Poulton designed 500GB Lacie drive but I seldom use it since it only holds archived photos, also it never spins down, which gets on my nerve since the WD MyBook I have doesn't annoy me with the constant hdd motor whine.

My buddy on the other hand has the Lacie Rugged SSD with TB and the Thunderbolt interface failed twice, but the USB port kept working and as far as I know he wasn't misusing it in any way.

Please correct me if I'm wrong since I don't have that much experience with my own Lacie products - just the aforementioned 500GB and a 16GB IamAKey - but the quality of their offering, especially in the TB spectrum, seems at least questionable and there aren't many alternatives when it comes to TB drives.

keysofanxiety · Apr 6, 2015

With regards to the formatting options: why isn't exFAT a viable solution? It works on both Windows & OS X, and to the best of my knowledge it doesn't have a 4GB file limit. Would somebody be happy to clarify?

MH01 · Apr 6, 2015

Has MR ever done a review on the front page that was negative? Kind of seem like endorsements, I could be wrong though

AlecZ · Apr 6, 2015

5t3f4n said:
>bright orange
>attractive

It looks nice. Not that I'd buy one after my and my friends' experiences with LaCie/Seagate.

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gpat said:
How is LaCie still in business? Their quality for price ratio is so low, I can't see anybody buying their products more than once.

Agreed, all they do is look nice.

NT1440 · Apr 6, 2015

keysofanxiety said:
With regards to the formatting options: why isn't exFAT a viable solution? It works on both Windows & OS X, and to the best of my knowledge it doesn't have a 4GB file limit. Would somebody be happy to clarify?

Hugely unstable if ejected improperly. I had been using it for work but now it's caused more headaches than it's worth.

FrizzleFryBen · Apr 6, 2015

MH01 said:
Has MR ever done a review on the front page that was negative? Kind of seem like endorsements, I could be wrong though

I would assume they only want to tell us about product we might be interested in. They aren't consumer reports.

In general, it's a very positive site for information. I like it that way, THEY don't bring too much politics into articles...that's where WE come in.

Butchie-T · Apr 6, 2015

Hard Drives not user replaceable????

Go deep because I'm passing on this one. Not a good choice IMHO.

g4cube · Apr 6, 2015

bryanzak said:
These drives have poor USB and Thunderbolt port connectors. They very quickly "wear out" to the point that when using the drive if you even barely bump it the cable will come unplugged and of course your drive is forcibly ejected.

And it's not just one drive. I work for a school district and we purchased a lot of these and months later many (most? all?) of them are having problems with loose connections.

The Thunderbolt connection was particularly flaky with the drive ejecting for no apparent reason at all. This happened so often that I stopped using it in favor of the USB3 port.

Bottom line: I would never buy one of these personally.

Student handling is a great stress test for any drive. Since these are standard connectors, I'd be interested in your experiences with other drives which use similar USB or Thunderbolt connectors.

In my searches for suppliers, I've not seen any "ruggedized" connectors.

Common failures I've seen with students has been when students transport drives in their backpacks with the cables still plugged in and connected. Any stress on the protruding cable will likely damage any device.

I tell my students to disconnect cables before tossing into their backpacks.

Same thing would happen to their tablets and phones if they always kept cables plugged in. A little care goes a long way to prevent problems. And don't get me started on cameras...

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NT1440 said:
Hugely unstable if ejected improperly. I had been using it for work but now it's caused more headaches than it's worth.

A knowledgeable person could format as ExFAT. Just use the appropriate utility on Mac or Windows.

LaCie probably just limits choices to what works best on each OS. ExFAT does have limitations that the average use might not be aware of.

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Butchie-T said:
Go deep because I'm passing on this one. Not a good choice IMHO.

Case is easily opened to replace drives. At least on my earlier Rugged model.

In any case, when replacing a drive on your own, you are voiding your warranty.

Self serve isn't a problem if you know what you are doing.

jclo · Apr 6, 2015

Butchie-T said:
Go deep because I'm passing on this one. Not a good choice IMHO.

This was poorly worded in the review and I've clarified. You'll void the warranty if you open it up, but you can unscrew it to get inside.

NT1440 · Apr 6, 2015

g4cube said:
A knowledgeable person could format as ExFAT. Just use the appropriate utility on Mac or Windows.

Yes, any idiot can format as such. What I was getting at is cables get bumped all the time. If that happens, you're way more likely to loose data because of a simple mistake than using the other formats.

jclo · Apr 6, 2015

MH01 said:
Has MR ever done a review on the front page that was negative? Kind of seem like endorsements, I could be wrong though

Generally we're vetting these things before we post them. I'm not going to review something that's total crap. If something deserves a very negative review, it's not worth my time to review it and post it, to be honest.

That said, there are negative and positive points in all of my reviews and there are instances when the review has tended to be more negative. Reach79, for example: https://www.macrumors.com/2015/01/27/reach79-signal-boosting-case-review/

There are some exceptions to that rule, we'd do a review on a popular product that we wanted to warn people not to buy, but I think we basically look at this from the angle of sharing things that are decent rather than sharing things that are crummy and not worth your time.

MH01 · Apr 6, 2015

jclo said:
Generally we're vetting these things before we post them. I'm not going to review something that's total crap. If something deserves a very negative review, it's not worth my time to review it and post it, to be honest.

That said, there are negative and positive points in all of my reviews and there are instances when the review has tended to be more negative. Reach79, for example: https://www.macrumors.com/2015/01/27/reach79-signal-boosting-case-review/

There are some exceptions to that rule, we'd do a review on a popular product that we wanted to warn people not to buy, but I think we basically look at this from the angle of sharing things that are decent rather than sharing things that are crummy and not worth your time.

Fair enough, so we should expect reviews of products that are worth purchasing . Good to know, thanks.

Butchie-T · Apr 6, 2015

jclo said:
This was poorly worded in the review and I've clarified. You'll void the warranty if you open it up, but you can unscrew it to get inside.

Ok, thanks for the update. Sure seemed strange that the drives would not have any type of access.

LaCie Review: Hands-On With the 4TB Rugged RAID Thunderbolt Hard Drive

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