Specifications, Pricing and Availability

I spent a lot of time researching military specifications, because the ioSafe Rugged Portable spec list is full of references to them. Only the government could come up with such a system. These tests can't be called, Fall from 20 Feet, nope; they have to be called MIL-STD-810 and the like. No wonder everything takes so long with the government, they have to decode everything to English first. Luckily ioSafe didn't just post the MIL spec codes and actually talks about how good their product is in the specifications.

Before we get too far along, let's look at the options and pricing. The ioSafe Rugged Portable isn't a plastic USB enclosure that can take a fall off a desk. It is a military grade enclosure that can be ran over by a tank, so you can expect to pay a bit more for it than some Buffalo plastic enclosure. The base unit with 250GB HDD and the standard 1 year warranty and 1 year Data Recovery Service costs 149.99. You can move the DRS and warranty to 3 years for 50 Dollars more or out to 5 years for 100 Dollars more. 250GB isn't a lot of space, but as I said, you can configure your Rugged Portable. With a 62 Dollar upgrade you get 500GB of capacity and for 250 Dollars you can have a full 1TB. That rounds out your options.

I dropped in a buzz phrase above, Data Recovery Service. If you somehow manage to damage your drive and it no longer works, ioSafe will pay to have your data removed from the broken disk and put on another HDD. This is for the most part the same plan they use on the popular Solo and SoloPRO models. You can think of this protecting like your backup plan. I say that because at CES this last year we were shooting ioSafe Rugged Portables with shotguns and they all survived several shots. If you really want to kill one, you have to move up to assault rifles.