This portable drive that ioSafe revealed at CES has got to be by far, the most rugged of all. I will go so far as to say it is the KING of rugged drives. The company is so confident that it is the most rugged, that it will offer free data recovery within the warranty period. For HDDs, costs range from $149 for 250GB to $399 for 1TB. For SSDs, it costs a little more. $1299 for a 256GB drive and $2799 for 512GB drive. Every drive comes with a one-year warranty that can be extended to 3 years for $50 and 5 years for $100.

The drive is crush-resistant to 2500 lbs or force, shock-resistant up to a 10 feet drop, and waterproof for up to 3 days under 10 feet of water. It can operate at an altitude of 15,000 feet. However, it is not fireproof like its desktop drives. A company representative said that “If it were, it wouldn’t be portable.”

The company even allowed the demoers to shoot at the drive! They were taken out to a shooting range where demoers got the chance to shoot at it with a 12-gauge shotgun and an M-16 rifle.

After one shotgun shot, the drive still plugged into the computer and the data loaded. However, after 6 rounds, the drive would not mount, but when the CEO removed the drive electronics and shock protection and then plugged the drive into a small SATA-to-USB adapter, the data loaded.

Now came the fun part. One demoer was allowed to shoot the drive with an M-16 machine gun. After four rounds, the drive fell to the floor, but the CEO still got the SSD drive lying on the floor. He took the remaining fragments of the shock protection off, and plugged it into the adapter, and the data was still readable! This is unbelievable!

This clearly is the world’s most rugged portable drive.

ioSafe’s portable drives come with full metal jacket, free data recovery.