The garish LaCie external hard drive known simply as Rugged has been upgraded, now with capacities up to 500GB. The LaCie product pages for their mobile collection can be found here. The device is available in two variants a version without FireWire and one with both FireWire 400 and FireWire 800, the latter being the more expensive of the two (by £30 no less!!)

The LaCie device provides extra shock protection when compared to competing products and the claims are that it will happily sustain a 90cm drop whilst in non-operating mode. LaCie makes it clear that it would be unwise to test the shock tolerances of an operating drive, an idea that we at abc Data Recovery wholly agree with.

Mobile Hard Disk Drives normally consist of a 2.5" standard IDE or SATA hard disk fixed into a casing that contains some simple electronics to enable it to simply attach to your computer by either USB or FireWire. We still think that extreme care should be observed when handling an operational dive, however, we  think that LaCie's efforts to make the non-operational shock tolerances of the standard hard disk drive are to be commended, and that it does indeed have benefits over other similar devices on the market currently.

Now we just have to get over the colour scheme!