Others might be designed to handle just a short fall off a desk, and not much more. In general, how much torture a given drive can take varies according to the nature of its enclosure. The level of survivability often depends on how much money you want to spend. What makes a drive rugged is the casing around it, which allows these drives to withstand shock, dousing, and the like. 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. Drives designed for more casual abuse are often marketed as "ruggedized," but that's an inexact term. Some rugged drives are built to withstand forces that would kill any bare-naked internal drive: strong impacts, water immersion, even fire.
However, you'll need to connect to a Thunderbolt 3 or USB 3.1 Gen 2 port for this to work - older USB connections that can't pump this much juice will require the RAID Rugged Pro to be powered by an included AC adapter. This means it can be used without a mains power outlet, with the USB-C connection providing enough power to run both the 5400RPM 2.5-inch hard disk drives housed within the Rugged RAID Pro.
The LaCie Rugged RAID Pro is, strictly speaking, a portable hard drive. Raid drives don't have to be bulky boxes confined to your desk.
That's enough for up to 168TB of total capacity, in a drive case that looks more like a filing cabinet! If you need even more storage capacity and protection against drive failure, LaCie also offers 6big and 12big versions of the Big, containing six and twelve individual hard drives respectively. The drives can be configured in a RAID 0 array where they team up to give you max file transfer speed, or as a RAID 1 array for auto file duplication in case one drive should fail. Available in 4TB, 8TB, 16TB and 28TB capacities, we recon the 8TB option is the best value, as prices rise sharply for the larger models.įor your money you get a pair of enterprise-class Seagate IronWolf Pro 7200RPM hard drives that deliver both reliability and speed, with an up-to-date USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C connection ensuring the drive speed won't be bottlenecked. LaCie's two-drive variant of its Big RAID solution isn't the cheapest for its capacity, but it is packed with high-end features. See our separate guide to the best NAS drives. The idea is you fit your own so you can choose the right amount of storage space to suit your needs and budget. NAS drives are usually sold without any actual hard disks inside. Like the sound of a NAS drive? There's just one - rather big - thing you should know.
Then you can view, upload or download your files whether you're at home or on the go, and friends and family can do the same if you allow them access.
You simply log in to the drive from a computer or mobile device using your private username and password. It's like having your own personal cloud storage at home, but with more storage space and no monthly fees. Network Attached Storage - these external hard drives can be connected to your internet router so they can be accessed from anywhere you can get an internet connection. Should one of the disks inside ever fail, you still have all your files safely saved on the other disk. With two hard disks inside and a clever controller processor, when you back up to a RAID drive, it automatically copies your data to both hard disks. But this isn't just to give you even more storage space - it's smarter than that. This acronym stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks and means an external drive that contains two or more individual hard disks.