LaCie's iconic bright orange Rugged portable hard drives have been searing our retinas since 2005, but it's recently been revealed by Global Distribution that two models in the Rugged range are going to be discontinued. You might assume these would be the oldest or slowest models in the line-up, but they're actually some of the newest and fastest drives: the Rugged SSD4, and Rugged SSD Pro5.
The Rugged SSD4 is/was available in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities, each operating through a super-fast 40 Gbps USB4 interface, enabling transfer speeds of up to 4000MB/s read and 3800MB/s write. That's impressively quick, but the Rugged SSD Pro5 was even more rapid. It used a bleeding-edge 80 Gbps Thunderbolt 5 connection, allowing the drive to achieve an incredible 6700MB/s read speed and 5300MB/s write rate.
Both the Rugged SSD4 and Rugged SSD Pro5 were only launched last year, making it especially surprising that they should be discontinued after such a short production run. And the reason for this early demise? Why, it's ongoing lack of NAND flash memory, of course. Since the start of the year we've seen countless news stories of SSD and memory card price hikes due to the global shortage of flash memory. It seems that within this sector the fastest memory has seen the most dramatic price increases; the very memory that’s needed to construct portable SSDs like the Rugged SSD4 and Pro5.
When our sister website Toms Hardware reviewed the Rugged SSD Pro5 in February 2025, the 2TB version was priced at $400, and the 4TB $600. Right now at B&H the latter will set you back a cool $1600, equating to a 167% price increase in less than 18 months (the 2TB version is already listed as discontinued). It's unclear whether LaCie chose to discontinue these SSDs because it was no longer able to physically source the necessary flash memory to manufacture the drives. I’d speculate that the components are still available, but are now so expensive to source that the end product is no longer economically viable to market.
As for why flash memory is in such short supply and now commanding crazy prices; we can thank unstoppable rise of AI. AI data processing centers devour high-bandwidth memory and fast SSD storage, causing AI companies to buy up huge stocks of solid state memory. This in turn is having a knock-on effect in other sectors that require DRAM and NAND flash memory, such as the memory card and portable storage industries. SSD manufacturers like LaCie (and its parent company, Seagate) have to fight for the remaining memory stock after the AI tech giants like Google, Meta, Nvidia and Open AI have paid top dollar to fuel their data centers. And when demand is high, prices go up, resulting in the unsustainably high prices we're seeing for the fastest and highest capacity portable SSDs.
