LaCie's portable storage drives have enjoyed a loyal consumer base, particularly among creative professionals valuing both performance and product design / appearance. After Seagate's acquisition, the brand has continued to cater to this segment with new products. The company has both USB 3.2 Gen 2 and Thunderbolt 3 SSDs under the LaCie brand, and is adding a new 2 GBps-class Rugged Mini SSD today.

The USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbps) ecosystem has been gaining traction recently after the launch of a number of low-cost portable SSDs based on native controllers. The new LaCie Rugged Mini SSD belongs to the same category, albeit with a slight premium for the product design and branding. The PSSD is available in four capacities - 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. The company sampled the 2TB version to put through our direct-attached storage test suite.

This review provides a comprehensive look at the performance profile and value proposition of the LaCie Rugged Mini SSD, with a particular focus on how Seagate differentiates the product from others using the same NAND / UFD controller combination.

Introduction and Product Impressions

External bus-powered storage devices have seen a growth in storage capacity and increase in speeds over the last decade. This has been due to advancements in flash technology (including the advent of 3D NAND and NVMe) and the evolution of faster host interfaces (such as Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.x). As a result, we have been seeing palm-sized flash-based storage devices capable of delivering 3GBps+ speeds. While those speeds can be achieved with Thunderbolt 4, mass-market devices have to rely on USB. Within the USB ecosystem, USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) is fast becoming the entry level for thumb drives and portable SSDs. USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbps) got off to a slow start, but recent computing platforms from both Intel and AMD have started to support it on the host side. The introduction of native USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 flash controllers such as the Phison U18 and Silicon Motion SM2320 has enabled PSSD vendors to bring low-cost power-efficient 20 Gbps external drives to the market.

Broadly speaking, there are currently five distinct performance levels in the PSSD market:

• 2GBps+ drives with Thunderbolt 3 or USB4, using NVMe SSDs
• 2GBps drives with USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, using NVMe SSDs or direct USB flash drive (UFD) controllers
• 1GBps drives with USB 3.2 Gen 2, using NVMe SSDs or direct UFD controllers
• 500MBps drives with USB 3.2 Gen 1 (or, Gen 2, in some cases), using SATA SSDs
• Sub-400MBps drives with USB 3.2 Gen 1, using UFD controllers

Within each of these levels, there is further segmentation into entry-level, mid-range, and premium based on the choice of internal components. The LaCie Rugged Mini SSD 2 TB we are looking at today belongs to the second category in the above list. Seagate is marketing this as an environment-friendly drive, and almost all of the package contents are recyclable / made of post-recycled content. The box comes with the main unit, a quick-start guide, and a 20 Gbps / 240W Type-C cable to connect the PSSD to the host.

The Rugged Mini SSD includes the traditional orange-colored rubber bumper around a metal enclosure with plastic end-caps. This enables an IP54 rating and a bit of ruggedness (ability to withstand 3m falls, and handle a car being driven over it). Disassembling the unit was actually quite trivial. The rubber bumper can be easily slid off, and the plastic end-caps clamp against the inner side of the metal enclosure with plastic tabs. This can be easily unclasped using a thin flat-head screwdriver. The PSSD is internally held in place by a plastic contraption, again with notches to keep the board secure and tight. The board is quite small compared to the size of the plastic frame, as shown in the gallery below.

The 2TB drive is double-sided, with four flash packages (two on each side). There are thick thermal pads on top of them. The flash packages are from ADATA.

There is no decoder available for the markings on the ADATA package, but we get a pointer from the controller on the board - the Silicon Motion SM2320, which is under its own compact thermal wrapper.

The Silicon Motion controllers fortunately have a flash identifier tool available, and processing the LaCie Rugged Mini SSD through it reveals the presence of Micron's B47R NAND (176L 3D TLC) inside the ADATA packages.

This review compares the LaCie Rugged Mini SSD against a host of other 2GBps-class PSSDs we have reviewed before. An overview of the internal capabilities of these PSSDs is given by CrystalDiskInfo. The LaCie Rugged Mini supports full S.M.A.R.T passthrough, along with TRIM to ensure consistent performance for the drive over its lifetime. However, some of the parameters read out (such as the total NAND writes, and a lifespan of less than 100% when fresh out of the box) seem suspect, and we believe some firmware fixes are in order for this.

Based on the details in the above table, it is evident that the interesting toss up is between the LaCie Rugged Mini and the Crucial X10 Pro - they use the same UFD controller / NAND combination, and the performance differences should boil down to the firmware configuration and thermal solution effectiveness.

Prior to looking at the benchmark numbers, power consumption, and thermal solution effectiveness, a description of the testbed setup and evaluation methodology is provided.

Testbed Setup and Evaluation Methodology

Direct-attached storage devices (including portable SSDs) are evaluated using the Quartz Canyon NUC (essentially, the Xeon / ECC version of the Ghost Canyon NUC) configured with 2x 16GB DDR4-2667 ECC SODIMMs and a PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD - the IM2P33E8 1TB from ADATA.

The most attractive aspect of the Quartz Canyon NUC is the presence of two PCIe slots (electrically, x16 and x4) for add-in cards. In the absence of a discrete GPU - for which there is no need in a DAS testbed - both slots are available. In fact, we also added a spare SanDisk Extreme PRO M.2 NVMe SSD to the CPU direct-attached M.2 22110 slot in the baseboard in order to avoid DMI bottlenecks when evaluating Thunderbolt 3 devices. This still allows for two add-in cards operating at x8 (x16 electrical) and x4 (x4 electrical). Since the Quartz Canyon NUC doesn't have a native USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 port, Silverstone's SST-ECU06 add-in card was installed in the x4 slot. All non-Thunderbolt devices are tested using the Type-C port enabled by the SST-ECU06.

The specifications of the testbed are summarized in the table below:

The testbed hardware is only one segment of the evaluation. Over the last few years, the typical direct-attached storage workloads for memory cards have also evolved. High bit-rate 4K videos at 60fps have become quite common, and 8K videos are starting to make an appearance. Game install sizes have also grown steadily even in portable game consoles, thanks to high resolution textures and artwork. Keeping these in mind, our evaluation scheme for direct-attached storage devices involves multiple workloads which are described in detail in the corresponding sections.

• Synthetic workloads using CrystalDiskMark and ATTO
• Real-world access traces using PCMark 10's storage benchmark
• Custom robocopy workloads reflective of typical DAS usage
• Sequential write stress test

In the next section, we have an overview of the performance of the LaCie Rugged Mini SSD in these benchmarks. Prior to providing concluding remarks, we have some observations on the PSSD's power consumption numbers and thermal solution also.

Performance Benchmarks

Benchmarks such as ATTO and CrystalDiskMark help provide a quick look at the performance of the direct-attached storage device. The results translate to the instantaneous performance numbers that consumers can expect for specific workloads, but do not account for changes in behavior when the unit is subject to long-term conditioning and/or thermal throttling. Yet another use of these synthetic benchmarks is the ability to gather information regarding support for specific storage device features that affect performance.

Seagate claims speeds of up to 2000 MBps for the PSSD, and they are reached for reads in the ATTO benchmarks provided below. ATTO benchmarking is restricted to a single configuration in terms of queue depth, and is only representative of a small sub-set of real-world workloads. It does allow the visualization of change in transfer rates as the I/O size changes, with optimal performance being reached around 1 MB for a queue depth of 4.

Full System Drive Benchmark Bandwidth (MBps)Full System Drive Benchmark Latency (us)Full System Drive Benchmark ScoreExpand All

The LaCie Rugged Mini SSD makes its mark as the top performer in the overall PCMark 10 Storage Bench scores among all units with native UFD controllers. Only the bridge-based SanDisk Extreme PRO v2 is able to deliver better numbers with its DRAM-based SSD.

Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks

The performance of the storage bridges / drives in various real-world access traces as well as synthetic workloads was brought out in the preceding sections. We also looked at the performance consistency for these cases. Power users may also be interested in performance consistency under worst-case conditions, as well as drive power consumption. The latter is also important when used with battery powered devices such as notebooks and smartphones. Pricing is also an important aspect. We analyze each of these in detail below.

Worst-Case Performance Consistency

Flash-based storage devices tend to slow down in unpredictable ways when subject to a large number of small-sized random writes. Many benchmarks use that scheme to pre-condition devices prior to the actual testing in order to get a worst-case representative number. Fortunately, such workloads are uncommon for direct-attached storage devices, where workloads are largely sequential in nature. Use of SLC caching as well as firmware caps to prevent overheating may cause drop in write speeds when a flash-based DAS device is subject to sustained sequential writes.

Our Sequential Writes Performance Consistency Test configures the device as a raw physical disk (after deleting configured volumes). A fio workload is set up to write sequential data to the raw drive with a block size of 128K and iodepth of 32 to cover 90% of the drive capacity. The internal temperature is recorded at either end of the workload, while the instantaneous write data rate and cumulative total write data amount are recorded at 1-second intervals.

CrystalDiskMark Workloads - Power Consumption
TOP: LaCie Rugged Mini 2TBCrucial X10 Pro 2TBKingston XS2000 2TBOWC Envoy Pro Mini 1TBCrucial X10 Pro 4TBSamsung T9 4TBPNY EliteX-PRO 4TBKingston DT Max 1TBSanDisk Extreme PRO v2 4TB	BOTTOM: Crucial X10 Pro 2TBKingston XS2000 2TBOWC Envoy Pro Mini 1TBCrucial X10 Pro 4TBSamsung T9 4TBPNY EliteX-PRO 4TBKingston DT Max 1TBSanDisk Extreme PRO v2 4TBLaCie Rugged Mini 2TB

Despite the firmware differences, the power consumption profile is remarkably similar for the LaCie Rugged Mini SSD and the Crucial X10 Pro. The peak is around 4W, but the PSSD spends most of the time around the 2W mark. The lack of a true deep sleep mode is unfortunate, as PSSDs like the Kingston XS2000 based on the same controller have no trouble in going into that mode after idling for around 20 minutes.

Final Words

The LaCie Rugged Mini SSD is available for purchase today, with suggested pricing of $80 (500GB), $120 (1TB), $190 (2TB), and US$350 (4TB) for the different SKUs. As part of the value additions, the PSSD is supported by the LaCie Toolkit software for on-demand backup and mirroring software, which allows for seamless file access and syncing across multiple devices. The PSSD carries a three-year warranty along with the Rescue Data Recovery service. A one-month subscription to the Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps plan is also bundled in the price.

LaCie's offerings have usually carried a premium, and while the Rugged Mini SSD maintains that trend, it is not as absurd as Samsung's play with their T9. The value proposition is decent - we could argue that the Crucial X10 Pro wins out on that front. However, among PSSDs based on native UFD controllers (that bring in power efficiency advantages at the cost of random access performance for generic storage workloads), the performance profile of the Rugged Mini SSD does stand out. With a SLC cache of more than 25% of the drive, only extreme power users can manage to run into the drive's limitations.

Cutting a long story short, if one is planning on buying a power-efficient 2TB PSSD, and believe that any use-case may involve transferring more than 500GB of content in one shot, the Crucial X10 Pro is probably the drive to get. Otherwise, the LaCie Rugged Mini only demands a small price and physical dimensions premium for a rugged IP54-rated 2GBps-class portable SSD.