Rugged, shock-resistant 2.5" HDD enclosure

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rudirautenbach

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I am in need of a really good quality, rugged USB enclosure that possibly has built-in shock protection (like most notebooks do) or just of such quality that it would withstand a small drop and being carried around everywhere.

Any ideas or suggestions from fellow members as to what to buy and where to start looking?

I have a new 500Gb Seagate drive.

Cheers Rudi
 
The shock protection in notebooks is a feature of the drive (the heads retract when they detect a fall).

Anyway there's the Freecom toughdrive, and Lacie Rugged drive, but they are both already filled with a hard drive.

Maybe just a regular 2.5" enclosure with a soft cover?
 
Synaesthesia said:
The shock protection in notebooks is a feature of the drive (the heads retract when they detect a fall).

Anyway there's the Freecom toughdrive, and Lacie Rugged drive, but they are both already filled with a hard drive.

Maybe just a regular 2.5" enclosure with a soft cover?
Click to expand...

There are two types of protection.

1. Is the one you mentioned. The drive has a sensor and you can customise the sensitivity of the sensor to park the heads if it detects a sudden acceleration in any of the 3 dimensions.
2. There is shock mounting. Business rugged and fully ruggedised notebooks have that. The drive is surrounded by foam like material which absorbs much of the kinetic energy.

The ideal is to have Option 2 and an SSD as Option 1 is not so reliable. This is what I have in my main notebook.

Transcend have some ruggedised enclosures too. I have one of those, it is supposedly drop tested and has some US DOD spec to which it conforms.
 
My experience is that normal hard drives don't like being carried around to much and being connected and disconnected a lot. I've seen to many hard drives fail. If you have the money, do consider buying a SSD. It will be a good move in terms of durability and speed.
 
Rectron supply these but only with drives, not enclosures only, the rugged ones that is.
 
Viva said:
My experience is that normal hard drives don't like being carried around to much and being connected and disconnected a lot. I've seen to many hard drives fail. If you have the money, do consider buying a SSD. It will be a good move in terms of durability and speed.
Click to expand...

Did you see notebook HDDs fail or desktop HDDs fail? The only external HDD that's failed on me was a LaCie two disk RAID-0 (Big Disk Extreme - 2x Maxtor 250GB). Power supply failed first time and after replacement one of the drives died. I also have a Seagate, Maxtor (4 y old), WD, Iomega, 2x Toshiba, 1x IcyDock (Seagate) and no failures. Of my notebook based portables I have Fujitsu, Hitachi, WD, Samsung, Transcend, Iomega, Fujitsu-Siemens and no failures yet. Now I do treat them well but I haven't had notebook mounted HDDs fail either - Toshiba. I've had an internal PC Maxtor fail too (bought in 2001) and failed in 2007/8. I guess I've been lucky :).
 
Synaesthesia said:
The shock protection in notebooks is a feature of the drive (the heads retract when they detect a fall).
Click to expand...
It depends. The Sudden motion sensor found in Apple's hardware is in the computer rather than the drive. And in my practical experience it does a damn fine job.
 
The Panasonic I have mentions no shock sensor but the Panasonic software has a setting to disable the shock warning.
The TZ Vaio has a fully customised setup you can use to optimise the shock response, you can set how much it will tolerate before retracting the heads - safe, performance and mid way settings with a few steps in between. It also has a display showing the acceleration and axis and moving the machine shows the graph respond.
 
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