We put the LaCie Pro5 through our usual external solid-state drive benchmarks suite, including Crystal DiskMark 6.0, PCMark 10 Storage Overall, 3DMark Storage, Blackmagic’s Disk Speed Test, and our folder transfer test. The first two are run on a PC with the drive formatted in NTFS, and the last two on a MacBook Pro using the Pro5’s native exFAT format. (We used two different Macs for these tests, as described above.)
Crystal DiskMark’s sequential speed tests provide a traditional measure of drive throughput, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. Meanwhile, the PCMark 10 Storage test measures an SSD’s readiness for various everyday tasks.
The Pro5 is the first Thunderbolt 5 SSD we have tested; for comparison, we have included other Thunderbolt drives and models with USB4 and USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 connectivity.
The Pro5’s sequential read and write speeds in Crystal DiskMark—run with the drive attached to our Windows testbed’s USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 port—were typical of a Gen 2×2 drive. However, that connection does not permit anything like the full throughput of the Thunderbolt 5 standard, so the results are not indicative of its true capability.
The Blackmagic benchmark—which tests a drive’s speed in reading and writing video files in different formats—is ideal for evaluating a creator-centric SSD such as the Pro5, and in that test its scores were easily the highest of any external SSD we have tested. The Pro5 completed our other Mac-based test—the folder transfer—in under a second, the same as all but one of the SSDs in our comparison group.
The Pro5 scored very well on the PCMark 10 Overall storage test, with only the two USB4 drives—the Oyen U34 Bolt and OWC Express 1M2—turning in better results. In the gaming-centric 3DMark Storage benchmark, the Pro5’s results were middling.
