Need portable storage that can survive a wilderness trek.or just the worst commute ever? Here’s what to look for, plus reviews of the best tough drives we’ve tested. See our picks for both platter drives and flash-based ones.
What’s the best way to be sure your external drive won’t suffer an early demise due to rough handling? Keep it in a climate-controlled room, wrapped in bubble wrap, resting on a feather pillow, and plugged safely into a stationary desktop PC.
Excellent! But…wait, you can’t do that? Oh, well. Looks like you’re going to need a drive designed to withstand the rigors of the real world.
Now, any ordinary external drive has some degree of toughness. But there’s everyday tough, and then there’s rugged. “Rugged” comes in many grades, though. Some rugged drives are built to withstand forces that would kill any bare-naked internal drive: strong impacts, water immersion, even fire. Drives designed for more casual abuse are often marketed as “ruggedized,” but that’s an inexact term. It’s also something of a misnomer, as the actual drive mechanism inside the tough shell is usually a normal, off-the-shelf storage component, just like you’d find in any laptop or desktop. What makes a drive rugged is the casing around it, which allows these drives to withstand shock, dousing, and the like. The level of survivability often depends on how much money you want to spend.
In general, how much torture a given drive can take varies according to the nature of its enclosure. Some will let you drive a car over them. Others might be designed to handle just a short fall off a desk, and not much more.
In this guide, we gather up the most impressive hard drive and SSD models we’ve reviewed, then walk you through the features most commonly found in rugged drives. If you’re the type of person who’s suffered a drive failure “in the field” before—whether that’s in your office, or climbing Kilimanjaro—these devices should keep you from suffering that pain again.LaCie Rugged RAID Shuttle
Buying a rugged drive involves a lot of the same decision points you’d face with an ordinary external drive. Let’s break them down.
The industry has settled on two main interfaces in external portable drives these days: USB 3 of various flavors (very common) and Thunderbolt (much less common). Which one is best for your needs depends on the ports on the computer or computers you are using. Also, these interfaces, in their latest iterations, actually overlap in terms of physical connectivity.
Newer and faster versions of both USB and Thunderbolt have been rolling out in some external drives over the last couple of years. They offer twice the potential bandwidth of previous implementations. You’ll need ports to match them on your computer to get the most speed out of these drives, but depending on the drive, the real-world speed ramifications may not be as big a deal as they might sound.
On the USB front, the latest interface you’ll see often is called USB 3.2, implemented mainly on USB Type-C ports. (USB4 exists, but it’s not very common yet.) USB-C ports are found on just about all new Windows PCs, and are a staple in all the latest MacBook Air and Pro laptops. (In the case of the Macs, it is paired with support for Thunderbolt 3 or 4 on the same ports.) USB Type-C is a slim, oval-shaped port with a cable that you can insert either side up.
To complicate matters, though, “USB Type-C” technically refers to the shape of the plug, while USB 3.2 is the spec having to do with the speed over that interface. You’ll find that some ordinary “Type-A” USB ports (the rectangular USB ports we are all used to) in recent-model systems also claim support for USB 3.2. Some late-model external drives that support USB 3.2 come with two cables, one with a Type-A connector at the system end, and one with a Type-C.
Beyond that, USB 3.2 (the speed specification) comes in two primary (and one rarer) flavors as of this writing: “Gen 1” and “Gen 2.” The iteration called “USB 3.2 Gen 2” has a maximum theoretical interface speed of 10Gbps. (Few single external devices can saturate that interface, even most solid-state drives.) “USB 3.2 Gen 1,” on the other hand, is identical in maximum potential speed to old, familiar USB 3.
