Beautiful boxes, ordinary drives inside them. And a rubber bumper that does considerably less than the people carrying it around a building site believe.
The LaCie Rugged is genuinely popular with photographers, videographers, surveyors and anyone whose work happens outdoors, and it is marketed on toughness. It is tougher than a bare drive. It is not tough in the way people think.
What the bumper does is spread the impact and protect the enclosure. What it cannot do — what nothing can do — is stop the heads inside from moving relative to the platter when the whole assembly decelerates from falling speed to a dead stop in a millisecond.
A Rugged dropped while switched off is usually fine: the heads are parked in a ramp at the edge of the disk. A Rugged dropped while spinning is a head crash, with damaged heads, a gouged platter, and abrasive debris circulating inside — exactly like any other 2.5in drive that has been dropped while running.
It just has nicer packaging around it. Case file here.
That is worth saying plainly, because video is the hardest file type to recover from a damaged file system. A photograph is small and usually sits in one unbroken run of blocks, so it can be carved straight out of the raw data. A 40-minute 4K file is enormous and almost always fragmented across the disk in pieces — and carving finds the start of it, then has to work out where the next fragment is.
It is recoverable, and we do it constantly. But on a badly damaged drive the honest answer is sometimes "most of it", and it is better to hear that now than to be surprised later.
£300 + VAT flat. Free diagnosis. No fix, no fee.
Drop the drive at our Quayside reception, or post it to us — it costs nothing to find out what happened. You get a written figure from the fixed bands before any work begins.