LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt is the toughest external drive you can get for your MacBook or Windows PC
There is one universal truth about external drives: they are not very durable. Most of the work goes into transfer speed and capacity, but when it comes to toughness, there’s only a handful of drives that can survive in the wild.
Image courtesy of MacWorld
The LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt is the latest iteration of the Rugged USB 3.0 Thunderbolt Series. If you are looking to take your MacBook or Windows 10 laptop out for a spin in the dirt, this little drive will keep your data safe, within a thick, orange rubber enclosure, featuring a IP 54 protection rating.
For those who may be wondering what’s an IP 54 rating, IP stands for International Protection rating, and it’s often referred to as Ingress Protection rating.
IP is a standard developed to attribute a rating to consumer products, by determining how well they perform when exposed to the elements.
For instance, the LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt’s IP 54 rating is “...Protected from limited dust ingress...”, and is “...Protected from water spray from any direction...”.
While this doesn’t mean that you can actually dunk this drive in a water pitcher and still use it afterwards, more typical scenarios, such as accidental drops, and most types of collisions, as well as particle dust or smoke, isn’t likely to affect this drive. As a matter of fact, this drive can even be dropped, several times, from a 6 feet height, and still be usable.
Performance
While some of the most rugged devices on the market may not be big on specs, this is definitely not the case with the LaCie. Benchmark tests have shown the LaCie Rugged as being capable of writing speeds up to 342MB/s, and reading speeds up to 382MB/s, at least for the 500GB SSD model. Speeds of course may vary depending on the type of storage available.
SSD options for the LaCie Rugged feature 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB, while 5400RPM HDD options offer 1TB and 2TB storage.
Compatibility
The LaCie Thunderbolt is backward compatible and it supports USB 3.0, which means it will work with any MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, or 12 inch MacBook Retina, as well as any Windows 10 laptop PCs featuring USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt ports.