The Neil Poulton-designed chassis features a bright orange, shock-resistant rubber casing that should add extra protection to the drive in the event of a drop or slip — which can happen easily when in the trenches of a shoot on location.
The Rugged line of portable hard drives come with either a USB 2.0 interface or a unit with FireWire 400, FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 interfaces. They’re also bus-powered, so there’s no need to haul around a power supply. Given that there is only one FireWire 800 port, this limits daisy-chaining multiple drives to a FireWire 400 throughput. If you’re offloading duplicate copies of cards in the field, it may be best for speed’s sake to do one copy at a time directly from the card to each of the individual drives.
