ioSafe Rugged Portable SSD (120GB)

The ioSafe Rugged Portable SSD ($499 list) is a pricey external SSD for your PC or Mac. Why so much? Well, the drive will survive and thrive, even if frozen into a block of ice. It can endure a 20-foot fall, or immersion in up to 10 feet of water. It includes recovery services for one year, even if you do the damage to the drive yourself. For that much peace of mind, half a thousand dollars is a bargain. All this makes earns it our nod for Editors' Choice for portable hard drives.

Design and Features
The ioSafe Rugged Portable SSD looks like an aluminum slab, about 1-by-4-by-6 inches (HWD). Its exterior is almost featureless, except for ioSafe branding on the top, a USB 3.0 port and Kensington lock port on one face, and more ioSafe branding plus serial number info on the bottom. The serial number is on the standard sticker with bar codes, but it's also etched into the bottom face of the enclosure, so ioSafe will know it's a valid drive even after it's been through hell. The USB port is submersible, like the rest of the drive. The whole shebang is rated to work even after a dunk in 10 foot deep water for 72 hours (three days). The drive is rated for 20-foot drops, 24 hours of salt spray, or even immersion in diesel fuel oils or aircraft fuel. We tested the drive by freezing it into a solid block of ice, and it still worked.

The drive itself is suspended inside the case, helping its 20-foot drop rating. Also helping is the Intel-sourced SSD (solid-state drive) inside: no moving parts mean very little internal movement during that drop, unlike the standard spinning 7,200rpm and 5,400rpm drives that are more susceptible to cracking. The drive itself is blank, and there's no included software. That's okay, since the drive will work fine with software like Rebit 5 or Apple Time Machine (if you're on a Mac). The SSD has a 120GB capacity, which is a little light on a dollar per GB basis compared with a traditional spinning hard drive like the Seagate GoFlex Slim (320GB) ($99.99 list, 4 stars). Then again, you'd probably worry if the GoFlex Slim suffered a five-foot drop.

Like the ioSafe SoloPRO desktop drive ($249.99 list, 4.5 stars), the Rugged Portable SSD comes with a three-year warranty and a one year subscription to a Data Recovery Service (DRS). DRS will try to recover your data if there's any physical damage to the drive, and is a boon that can save you up to $5,000 (recovery engineers' rates are pricey). It would have been nice if ioSafe had included three years of DRS, but you can at least upgrade to three years for $50.

Performance
The Rugged Portable SSD got some of the highest PCMark05 HDD test scores I've ever seen (25,101 points), mainly because of its SSD drive with USB 3.0 interface. To put this into perspective, a fast USB 2.0 drive will do about 2,700 points, and a fast eSATA drive with SSD like the Apricorn Aegis Padlock Pro SSD (256GB) ($759 list, 4.5 stars) will do 17,460 on PCMark05. We're just starting to use PCMark7's HDD test, and the ioSafe got a 3,946 point score on a different scale from PCMark05. On the drag and drop test, the ioSafe took 16 seconds to transfer a 1.2GB file. This time is a bit longer than the Aegis, which took 13 seconds, but it's still not bad. It's notable that the drive's scores didn't significantly change when the drive was frozen into a block of ice. The drive works fine even when frozen to below 20 degrees F.

Like the ioSafe SoloPRO, the Rugged Portable Drive SSD really doesn't have too much direct competition: drives like the Iomega eGo BlackBelt Mac Edition ($199.99 list, 4 stars) is "rugged", but it's only rated for a 7 foot drop and has no waterproofing. The Aegis Padlock Pro is fast, but it's designed around encryption rather than survivability. There are other rugged drives like the LaCie Rugged Hard Disk (stay tuned for our review), but that drive is similar to the Iomega eGo BlackBelt in that its primary strength is its drop rating. The ioSafe's performance, price, included recovery service, and rugged capabilities make it the perfect portable complement to the ioSafe SoloPRO. And like the SoloPRO did for the desktop class, the Rugged Portable Drive SSD earns our highest honors and Editors' Choice for portable hard drives.

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the ioSafe Rugged Portable SSD with several other hard drive side by side.

More hard drive reviews:
??? ioSafe Rugged Portable SSD (120GB)
??? Promise Pegasus R6
??? Rebit 5 (1TB)
??? Seagate GoFlex Slim (320GB)
??? Seagate GoFlex Satellite Mobile Wireless Storage (500GB)
?? more

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/9Gpd0QtyP-A/0,2817,2395417,00.asp

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