Packaging & Contents
The RuggedKey ships in a plastic carton. On the back of the carton there is a two year warranty stamp and a summary of software that already present on the drive. We did not bother trying the software it as most of the bundled software we have seen to date is pretty much useless compared to the freeware options that can easily be had elsewhere (e.g truecrypt and syncbackup). Lacie have also indicated a maximum speed rating of 100 MB/s on the front of the box in contrast to the 150 MB/s indicated on the Lacie website. In both cases Lacie do not indicate whether the stated speeds are read or write.
Box Front
Box Back
Dimensions & Weight
The drive measures 5.3cm long, 2.7cm wide and 2.1cm high. This is the second largest drive we have seen to date. Weighing in at 32 grams the Lacie is also the second heaviest drive we have seen. These dimensions include the large orange cap. Removing the cap halves the weight to 16 grams and significantly reduces the drives size to 5.3cm long, 2.4cm wide and 0.7cm high which makes the drive a lot more manageable on our opinion. The downside to removing the cap is that the USB connector will remain exposed, probably not a problem in our opinion and probably what the designers had in mind as we don't see anyone wanting to carry the large orange cap around. Of course if you were to toss the drive out of an aeroplane as per the marketing info, we doubt it would fair as well without the orange cap!
Build Quality
The build quality is excellent. There is a metal shell encasing the drive which gives it a good solid feel and the keyring attachment is also rock solid. The drive really does live up to its rugged name. Unfortunately, unlike on most flash drives, there is no LED to indicate whether or not the drive is in use.
Front
Back
Test System
The test rig was a high end Core-i7 workstation kitted out with a 256GB Solid State drive and 16GB of RAM. The system was designed to be overclocked to 5GHZ but for the benchmarks, only the stock frequencies of 1.6GHz idle, 3.4GHz active and 3.8GHz turbo boost were used.
CrystalDiskMark Speed Test[FAQ]
CrystalDiskMark is a free disk benchmarking utility that is very simple to use. It takes eight measurements: the read and write speeds in megabytes per second (MBps ) for sequential, 512KB, random 4KB and 4KB parallel disk operations. There are more screenshots from this benchmark posted on the web than any other, probably due to its clean and simple display. There is further information, including instructions on how to benchmark your own drives, on the CrystalDiskMark wiki page .
CrystalDiskMark Score
The RuggedKey scored 198/45 MB/s in the sequential read/write tests. This sequential read speed is the fastest we have seen to date, albeit by a whisker. The sequential write speed is also impressive but not spectacular. The remainder of the synthetic performance indicators are also mostly above average making this drive a reasonably rounded performer with outstanding sequential read performance. That weakest relative area of performance for this drive is its 4k random read speed which came in at 0.311 MB/s
CrystalDiskMark Benchmark Speed Test
ATTO Disk Benchmark[FAQ]
The Atto Disk Benchmark has probably been around for longer than any other disk benchmarking software, and you can tell from its dated interface! The utility was designed to measure regular disk drive performance but it's more than up to the task of measuring both USB flash drive and SSD speeds as well. The utility measures disk performance rates for various sizes of file and displays the results in a bar chart showing read and write speeds at each file size. The results are displayed in megabytes per second (MBps ). There is further information, including instructions on how to benchmark your own drive, on the Atto wiki page .
ATTO Benchmark Speed Test
ATTO Score
The ATTO results for the Lacie are broadly in line with the CrystalDiskMark scores and at 200/45 MB/s come in significantly higher than Lacies claimed speed of 100 MB/s on the box and 150 MB/s on their website.
AS SSD Real World Copy Speed[FAQ]
The AS SSD benchmarking program was recently developed specifically for benchmarking SSD's. The utility is able to take several measurements that are well suited to solid state drives. One of the tests, ISO copy, is also relevant to slower storage devices including flash drives. The ISO copy test places two large 500MB files in a folder on the drive and then times how long it takes to copy the folder to another location on the same drive. The result is reported in both MBps and time taken. It's a real-world test that gauges a drives ability to read and write at the same time. Drives that have a good balance between their read and write speed fare relatively well on this test. There is further information, including instructions on how to use it to benchmark your own drive, on the AS SSD wiki page .
Real World Copy Speed Score
This test shows that the drive would take 32.70 seconds to create a copy of a large 1GB video file. Most drives complete this test at half their write speed, the RuggedKey outperformed on this real world test. To date only two drives have beaten this score, the Lexar Triton and the Sandisk Extreme.
AS-SSD Copy Benchmark Speed Test
Conclusion
We like this drive, it has the highest sequential read speed we have seen to date and the remainder of its performance profile is also respectable. At 198 MB/s the read speed is almost double the speed stated on the drives box, and 33% higher than the speed quoted on Lacies website, an unusual result that needs verification (comments from owners welcome). In terms of form factor we are very disappointed with the oversized orange cap and can't realistically see anyone leaving it attached to the drive. Without the cap this drive is superbly strong, ultra compact and performs respectably, we like it a lot. The only problems we do have with the Lacie RuggedKey are its price which is simply not competitive at this time and we would have liked to have seen higher random 4k speeds for this top end drive.
Original Review by: Updated 12 years ago.
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