ioSafe Rugged Portable Hard Drive welcomes abuse

By Geoff Duncan Published January 10, 2011

ioSafe might not be the largest or best-known makers of ruggedized storage devices on the planet, but the company has made an impression at this year’s CES short by abusing its Rugged Portable hard drive in creative ways—including submerging the device in water and blasting it with a shotgun…then proving the data is intact. For folks who live a dangerous lifestyle—or perhaps just have rambunctious children or siblings—the drive provides reasonable assurance that precious data will be intact and recoverable—and ioSafe backs that up with up to $5,000 of third-party data recovery service.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Iosafe says the Rugged Portable drive can handle immersion in either fresh or sale water for up to three days at depths of up to 30 feet and also stand up to immersion in oils, fuels, and other solvents. The drives can withstand drops of up to 20 feet and the titanium version can handle being crushed by up to 5,000 pounds of pressure. (An aluminum version can handle up to 2,500 pounds.) The drives can also handle continuous exposure to sand, salt, fog, rain, ice, and UV radiation for up to 24 hours, meeting MIL-STD-810G specification.

Recommended Videos

The drives are available in both traditional hard drive form with capacities from 250 GB to 1 TB and SSD versions with capacities of 256 to 512 GB. The drives work with PCs and Macs and feature USB 2.0 and 3.0 connectors, along with a FireWire 800 connector. The drives are bus-powered—no separate AC adapter necessary—and ship with a USB Micro-B Y-Cable for for use with low-powered USB 2.0 ports.

Pricing? Well, the 256 GB SSD version starts at $1,299.99 with an aluminum case and $1,999.99 for the titanium case: bump that up to $2,799.99 and $3,499.99 for the 512 GB version. But hard drive versions are much more affordable, with a 150 GB 5,000rpm hard drive going for $149.99 all the way through a 1 TB 5000rpm version for $399.99.

And if you just want to buy one of the drives to have a blast, check out ioSafe’s demonstration video:

Former Contributor

Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

Computing

Google Earth’s AI misadventure lasted only a day. It was a tale of dangerous ignorance.

Nuclear reactors, tanks, and historical destruction on a life-like satellite map? Yeah, that's bad.

Nano Banana AI image generator representation.

Technology behemoths are clearly not reading the room, or they are just moving faster than they should when it comes to AI deployment. Google has already stuffed its Gemini AI in every corner of its software stack, from Android to daily productivity tools like Gmail that are used by hundreds of millions of users every day. AI is everywhere. Not all of it is bad, mind you. But in a few places, it just feels forced.

In its latest AI-fication experiment, the company targeted Google Earth. The idea was to let the audience use its Nano Banana 2 AI image generator and make images that can be placed on the map view. On paper, it's a cool idea. What would the Colosseum of Rome look like in your urban neighborhood? Yeah, fun stuff like that.

Computing

AMD is apparently gearing up to raise GPU prices right after Nvidia’s steep hike

AMD has reportedly told AIB partners about a price hike that goes into effect in. August.

AMD RX 7800

AMD is next in line to raise the asking price of its Radeon GPUs, merely days after the news of a similar hike coming for Nvidia graphics cards started making waves. As per ChannelGate on Weibo (h/t VideoCardz), AMD has informed its board partners that the price of GPU and memory bundles will go up by at least 10% in August.

Is a similar price hike coming for standalone graphics cards? I won't be surprised if that happens. The situation is so bad that AMD is planning to bring back graphics cards with 4GB of onboard memory. AMD just introduced the RX 9050 GPU, which costs $279. Notably, it's just $20 less than the RX 9060 XT that offers double the graphics memory.

Computing

Microsoft will make Windows work well with just 8GB RAM. We desperately need it

The dream of a reliable and affordable Windows laptop hinges on the next milestone at Microsoft.

Surface laptop on wooden table

The year 2026 has marked a huge course correction for Microsoft after years of frustrating users with plenty of confusing processes, unoptimized UI elements, and just the generous bloatware that can bring any Windows system to a crawl. Microsoft has finally shifted into a new phase. From fixing the right-click behavior to speeding up the Search system, the company has fixed plenty of papercuts.

The next major milestone is making Windows 11 run smoothly on Windows PCs with just 8GB of RAM. That directly means entry-level and budget laptops will at least get the basics right, even if that means sacrificing the on-device AI bells and whistles. Let's face it. The increasingly AI-first approach to computing on a Windows 11 machine is a little too taxing on the hardware at hand.