LaCie Rugged Mini (500GB)

The LaCie Rugged Mini (500GB) ($114.99 list) is a fast USB 3.0 drive that can take some abuse. Its rescue orange?colored bumper advertises that it can take a (slight) beating and continue working. It's the drive for tossing into the daily commute bag or for carting around in checked luggage, and as long as you're traveling in the First World the drive should arrive with your data intact. But there are more extreme ruggedized drives out there.

Design and Features
The Rugged Mini is an aluminum-shelled drive with an unmistakable orange shock bumper around its perimeter. There's a pass-through for the USB 3.0 cable and a tiny drive access LED, but otherwise there aren't too many distinguishing features on the drive. The bumper has grid lines molded into its surface, similar to the design on the older version of the Rugged Mini (the one with FireWire and USB), and it's robust enough to let LaCie claim the drive can survive a drop of 1.2 meters (about 4 feet 3 inches). Other drives like the Iomega eGo BlackBelt Mac Edition ($199.99 list, 4 stars) are rated for a seven-foot drop. The Rugged Mini is also rain-proof, but not sealed for immersion.

You get more than just the drive with your purchase. The LaCie Genie backup utility is simple, designed for easy backups of your important data but not full "bare-metal" catastrophic system recovery. With the LA-Private utility you can create a 256-bit AES encrypted partition on your hard drive to protect vital data from prying eyes. The good thing about LA-Private is that it doesn't require you to install a program on your hard drive, so it will work away from your primary PC or Mac. Last but not least is the Wuala online backup: This comprises 10GB of secure online storage using its own utility, so its backups would be separate from those you set with Genie. Contrast this with a program like IDrive, which integrates its online backup with the local utility. Wuala's 10GB of space will cost you $29 per year after the first year, which is kind of pricey (IDrive charges nothing for 5GB of storage and $49.50 for 150GB).

Performance
Because the Rugged Mini uses a 7,200rpm spinning disk and has a USB 3.0 interface, it's pretty darn fast. It took an average of 20 seconds to transfer our 1.2 GB test folder, and it got high scores on the PCMark05 HDD test (6,141) and the PCMark7 HDD test (1,606). To put that into perspective, the Western Digital My Passport Elite (500GB) ($119.99, 3 stars) earned 2,549 on PCMark05 using USB 2.0, and the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Ultra-Portable Drive (500GB) ($99.99 list, 4.5 stars) 4,794 on PCMark05 with USB 3.0. For a spinning drive it's fast, but SSDs like the Apricorn Aegis Padlock Pro SSD (256GB) ($759 list, 4.5 stars) will do 17,460 on PCMark05 on an eSATA connection?a huge difference, though one you'll pay much more for. Our highest scores ever were achieved by the ioSafe Rugged Portable SSD (120GB) ($499 list, 4.5 stars), which scored a blazing 25,101 on PCMark05 and 3,946 on PCMark 7 (both with USB 3.0).

The LaCie Rugged Mini is a fast and durable portable hard drive for people that want a less expensive storage solution than our Editors' Choice?winning ioSafe Rugged Portable SSD. Because the LaCie is a spinning hard drive, it costs only 23 cents per gigabyte rather than the $4.16-per-gigabyte price you'll pay for the ioSafe. Then again, the ioSafe includes lots of other features that make it the superior rugged drive for extreme use. The Seagate GoFlex is a less expensive and more versatile drive, as it can be adapted to use on a FireWire-equipped Mac or powered eSATA laptop. Therefore the LaCie exists somewhere in the middle: It's more durable than the run-of-the-mill external drive, but it's not (literally) bulletproof like the ioSafe. Think of the LaCie as "rugged lite": fine for taking the light beatings it will get on your way to and from work, but not the external drive you want with you on an Antarctic expedition.

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Buffalo MiniStation Cobalt USB 3.0 with several other hard drive side by side.

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??? LaCie Rugged Mini (500GB)
??? ioSafe Rugged Portable SSD (120GB)
??? Promise Pegasus R6
??? Rebit 5 (1TB)
??? Seagate GoFlex Slim (320GB)
?? more

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