LaCie Refreshes its Rugged Hard Drive

LaCie announced on Thursday that it updated its Rugged Thunderbolt-tainted external drive with faster speeds, a tougher design and an integrated Thunderbolt interface cable. The drive also has improved dust, shock and water resistance, and provides a USB 3.0 port for customers who don't have Thunderbolt tech on their desktop or laptop.

The company reports that there are two versions of the Rugged drive: the SSD version and the hard disk version. With the SSD version, this drive provides transfer speeds of up to 387 MB/s. The hard disk version provides speeds of up to 122 MB/s, a 35 percent improvement in speed when compared to a FireWire 800 connection.

"With both Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 interfaces, the LaCie Rugged is an ideal match for Mac and PC users," states the PR. "Because USB 3.0 is backward compatible, users can connect it to any standard computer. The LaCie Rugged is also fully bus–powered through the USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt cables."

According to LaCie, the HDD version of the Rugged drive is MIL-compliant, which means the outer casing is so tough that data is protected when the drive is accidently dropped up to 6.6 feet (in non-operating mode). The drive also has IP 54-level protection against dust and water when the removable cover is put back into place. The SSD version adds to all of that, featuring protection against shock and vibration too.

The specs show that both versions of the Rugged drive come packed with LaCie Backup Assistant so that users can backup their PC to the drive, and LaCie Private-Public, which offers password protection with AES 256-bit software encryption.

The updated Rugged drive provides four capacities in all: 1 TB ($219.99) and 2 TB ($299.99) hard drives (5400 RPM, 64 MB of cache), and 250 GB ($299.99) and 500 GB ($499.99) SSDs (SATA 3). All four will be available mid-June through LaCie resellers.

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