LaCie Rugged Type C – Hardware Review
Hard drives aren’t particularly the most glamorous pieces of equipment. They’ll spend their days being tossed around in your backpack or residing in a vacant corner of your desk. The only time they really draw attention is when they break, yet they serve an important purpose.
As its name suggests, the LaCie Rugged has for many years aimed to prevent the whole breaking thing from happening. Its design hasn’t changed much since the first iteration, but it doesn’t really need to. This year’s version is updated with a USB-C port, making it much more compatible with today’s hardware.
It’s still a LaCie product, however, which gives it a fittingly higher price tag. This begs the question, is the Rugged still worth it in 2019? Let’s find out.
Setup
Upon first plugging it in, the Rugged will only show a 256MB partition called Lacie Setup. After running the setup, you can format an NTFS partition for Windows based on the capacity of the drive. An additional 32GB FAT32 partition can be set up for use with Mac OS and Linux devices.
Most modern drives don’t need to go through such a process, but Lacie’s reasoning for it is that users want to format the drive in different ways. This would make sense, as it’s largely geared to professionals and power users who would use terabytes of storage.
Design
As we mentioned earlier, the Rugged features the same iconic rectangular aluminum enclosure with a thick orange silicone casing. The silicone wrap is highly durable and textured to provide a good level of grip. The drive itself is fairly compact; both the outer shell and casing can be removed if need be.
The Rugged is built to take a beating. It can be driven over, dropped four feet, and will survive through rain or other light moisture. It’s worth keeping in mind that it’s still a hard drive, not a solid-state drive. This means it has moving parts, so dropping it while the disc inside is spinning could result in the loss of your data.
Fortunately, modern problems have modern solutions and drive recovery services are becoming more effective and affordable than ever. If you have a drive with corrupted, damaged, or otherwise lost data, you can use a manufacturer-approved service such as Secure Data Recovery to easily regain access to all your files and media.
Performance
For a traditional mechanical drive, the 130 MBps transfer speed is impressive and adequate for normal file transfers. Only much more expensive SSDs can really offer anything faster than 150 MBps. Being a LaCie product, you can expect it to last for as long as you need it and the rugged design will help quite a lot.
If you want something smaller that’s without moving parts, or has a faster transfer speed, you can expect to pay a fair bit more. The 2TB Samsung T3 SSD, for example, is almost four times the price of a 4TB Rugged drive.
For another year, LaCie has set the standard for hard drive design. With a silicone case, two-year warranty, and solid build quality, the Rugged is made to last.
LaCie Rugged Type C - Hardware Review,
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