disaster-proof hard drive posts on CNET

IoSafe Rugged Portable review: Anger management alternative

Admit it! Sometimes you are so mad, you just want to slam something on the floor, step on it, and then kick it a few times. I know a friend who did just that with his portable drive only to later regret losing data and hurting his big toe. If only he had had the IoSafe Rugged Portable, his data would have been safe. His toe's another story, however.

First introduced at CES 2011 with a bang (quite a few bangs, actually), IoSafe's Rugged Portable is the first mobile external hard drive that can really withstand serious beatings and abuse. The drive can handle drops, water submersion, dust, chemicals, and being crushed by a vise. I have personally shot at it with a shotgun--at a demo, not out of anger--and it didn't break.

This means that if you happen to drop it in the street and the thing gets run over by cars, chances are it will survive quite easily. As a matter of fact, the only situation it seems the Rugged Portable won't survive is extreme heat, which its brother the IoSafe SoloPro can handle. To make up for this, the Rugged Portable is about 15 times more compact and lighter. The drive is slightly smaller than a 3.5-inch internal hard drive and weighs about 1 pound. It's designed to be carried around, while the SoloPro is meant to be used at home only. … Read more

IoSafe pitches Rugged Portable drive

LAS VEGAS--If you're looking for a hard drive that can withstand fire, water submersion, being crushed by a 35,000-pound excavator, and so on, there are none better than IoSafe devices such as the IoSafe SoloPRO, which is based on a regular hard drive, or the Solo SSD, which is based on a solid-state drive.

They all have one problem, however: their physical size. The drives are generally huge and weigh tens of pounds thanks to layers of protection. This means they're not even in the vicinity of portability, which is something most of us want these days.

Well, that's now changed. The company announced today its very first portable drive that offers similar levels of mishap-resistance as the rest of its products, the IoSafe Rugged Portable external hard drive. By the way, this is the product IoSafe has been being mysterious about in the weeks leading up to CES 2011.

The Rugged Portable comes in three flavors, including aluminum HDD, aluminum SSD, and titanium SSD. The HDD version is available in capacities between 250GB and 1TB, while the SSD versions are available in capacities of either 256GB or 512GB. All versions are based on a standard 2.5-inch drive and support USB 3.0 with backward-compatibility to USB 2.0. IoSafe says the drive will support Firewire connectivity by March.

IoSafe claims that the Rugged Portable provides physical security features including:… Read more