We get it, you're rough on your equipment. Sometimes you break your $99 budget external hard drives before you've paid off the credit card you used to buy them. The 2TB CalDigit Tuff ($179.99) is hardy enough to survive the slings and arrows of business travel, even if you're a wildlife photographer or a foreman on a construction site. It's able to take a hit, it's waterproof and dust-proof, and it's very affordable given the amount of storage you get. Put this all together, and it's enough for the Tuff to earn our latest Editors' Choice award for rugged hard drives.
Design and Features
The body of the Tuff ($198.00 at Amazon) looks like a block of silver-colored aluminum, with parallel sets of raised cooling fins on the top and bottom. It measures 0.91 by 3.66 by 5.63 inches (HWD) and fits easily in a coat pocket or your commute bag. Surrounding the outer edges of the drive is a replaceable rubber jacket that's available in five colors: black (as on our test unit), blue, gray, green, and orange. (Additional jackets cost $14.95 each.) The jacket helps the drive survive drops up to 4 feet (1.22 meters).
The Tuff is MIL-STD-810G tested and rated IP57, which means that it will survive being dropped in a dusty environment like a construction site. What's even more impressive is that the drive body is rated for water immersion of 9.8 feet (3 meters) for 30 minutes. Other rugged drives like the G-Technology G-Drive ev ATC With Thunderbolt and the LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt are only rated for quick dips (respectively, less than a minute in 1 foot of water or simple splashes). The Tuff is the drive you want if you expect to need to access your data outdoors, rain or shine, for example if you work at a spa, pool, or water park.
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The drive sports a single USB-C port, located under a rubber flap on the jacket, and comes with two cables: one for connecting to another USB-C port and one for connecting to a Type-A USB port. This is key, since it allows you to use the drive with older USB 3.0 jacks and newer USB-C or Thunderbolt 3 ports. The Tuff comes with a translucent storage box for the drive and both adapter cables.
The drive comes formatted for HFS+, which means you can use it with a Mac right out of the box. If you need to use it with a Windows PC, you can reformat it for NTFS or exFAT. The drive comes with a two-year warranty, which is a bit shorter than the three years you get from G-Technology or LaCie.
Value and Performance
The Tuff is currently available in one capacity, 2TB. At $179.99, it costs about 9 cents per gigabyte. (A 1TB SSD version has been announced, but has not been released yet, and no pricing is available for it.) The value of the 2TB iteration is phenomenally better than the $1 per gigabyte of the 500GB LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt SSD, the 23 cents of the G-Drive ev ATC, and even the 13 cents of the Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC($76.49 at Amazon). In fact, it's closer to what you'll see from non-rugged drives like the 2TB Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim( at Amazon) (4.9 cents). As far as rugged drives go, the Tuff is a bargain.
On the performance side, the Tuff is no slouch, either. It took 12 seconds to copy a 1.2GB test folder in our drag-and-drop test, which is average for hard drives (and the same as the G-Drive ev ATC using the Thunderbolt interface). On the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, the Tuff returned throughput results of 126.2MBps read and 124MBps write over USB 3.0, and 125.9MBps read and 121.8MBps write using USB-C. Those results put the Tuff a bit behind the G-Drive ev ATC on read operations (130.6MBps), but very close in write speed (125MBps). Both are far behind the rates you'll see with SSDs, such as the LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt (382MBps read, 347MBps write), but competitive with other spinning hard drives like the G-Technology G-Drive mobile USB-C ($99.99 at Amazon) (131.7MBps read, 123.2MBps write, using the USB 3.0 interface) and the Transcend Storejet 300 for Mac( at Amazon) (124.1MBps read, 123.8MBps write, using Thunderbolt).
Waterproof and durable, the CalDigit Tuff is both small enough to fit in your pocket and able to survive extreme environments. It's ready for both legacy and newer PCs, with both USB and USB-C cables included. It's also much more economical than the LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt, which the CalDigit Ruff leapfrogs as our new top pick for rugged hard drives.
Not only is the CalDigit Tuff a rugged hard drive designed to survive extreme conditions, it's also a terrific value.
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