Rugged Hard Drives: Which one do you like best?

Transcend:
Amazon.com: Transcend Information 1 TB USB 3.0 External Hard Drive - Military Drop Standards (TS1TSJ25M3): Computers & Accessories
Amazon.com: Transcend Storejet 1TB Portable Hard Disk USB 3.0 (25H3P): Computers & Accessories

ADATA:
Amazon.com: ADATA DashDrive 1TB HD710 Military-Spec USB 3.0 External Hard Drive AHD710-1TU3-CBL (Blue): Computers & Accessories
http://www.amazon.com/Adata-Superior-Ash141Tu3Cbk-External-Drive/dp/B005JEXKGI

 

Anyone have experience with rugged HDDs?

The ADATA ones have some negative reviews on amazon regarding the connectors.

 

To be honest, I never see people purchase these types of externals. The garden variety ones are fairly robust. I have an external Toshiba that holds up well. Of course it's not military grade as those are, but the plastic casing doesn't feel cheap at least.

 

Haven't seen anyone purchase these either. Assuming that you're not trying to store a ton of data like 1TB or so, a SSD in an external case would be a better, more rugged buy.

 

The right question to ask is: what is the weak point(s) of a 2.5" HDD?

A: 1) the flimsy metal top which must not be pushed on with your fingers (or anything else), noting that 3.5" HDD aren't as problematic with regard to this (stronger metal top and more vertical space within), and 2) that the HDD must not be subjected to high G's by dropping it.

The 1st is easy, just be very careful how you handle any 2.5" HDD.

Or even better, avoid handling any 2.5" HDD.

The 2nd is even easier: just don't drop the HDD or the laptop.

From what I've seen here on NBR, SSD's have a bad habit of failing.

And if you've got important data on the SSD, it is almost certainly gone.

You can't spend some large sum of money to recover it, with a specialist like you often can with a HDD, it is simply gone.

If you tack on being sure to do frequent SSD backups to HDD, then I agree.

Otherwise, your answer is incomplete in that it omits the importance of backing up to HDD when one runs any SSD unit.

 

Hadn't seen that much SSD failure around here. Most of what I've seen is from older OCZ SandForce drives. But anyway, there shouldn't be just one backup point to begin with; having an external drive (either the rugged HDD or SSD) should be just one backup, with others elsewhere. For example, my important stuff sits on an external drive (bare 2.5" HDD in a dock), a flashdrive or two, and two cloud services (Dropbox and SkyDrive, with SkyDrive also backing up Dropbox automatically).

 

In my point of view i like the first one option (Transcend Information 1 TB USB 3.0 External hard drive military drop standards TS1TSJ25M3 this one is better than others two options.

 

Aye, and we seldom see SSD failure cases with RMAs. Some are more problematic than others indeed, though.