by Sam Glover
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Reviewing an external hard drive is not generally very interesting. The best ones are no-frills, empty drives. Since you cannot test long-term reliability in the short term, the feature that matters most is effectively un-testable.
The ioSafe drives are good external hard drives. They come in attractive packages for reasonable prices (about $250 for the 1TB SoloPro, and $160 for the 500GB Rugged Portable), and have plenty of space for backing up your client files. They also leave out the crapware that tends to come with external hard drives.
Ending the review there, however, would utterly fail to do justice to the ioSafe drives. Unlike a regular drive, these are built to protect your data from the kind of abuse that would turn a regular drive into a pile of particles.
Here is a closer look at the first drives you might be able to trust with your most-important data–without a secondary backup.
IoSafe master 020107 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
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UPDATE–Sam Glover: I don’t think you’ll be sorry if you get the ioSafe Solo G3.
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UPDATE–Sam Glover: If you just want a solid backup drive and you don’t want to pay a lot for it, get the WD Elements 2TB portable drive. It’s nothing fancy, just a 2-terabyte external hard drive about the size of a pocket Moleskine notebook. And since it gets all the power it needs from your computer’s USB port, you only need the one short cable (which is included). Everything about it — including the price — make it a near-perfect basic backup solution.
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