SimpleTough

This hard disc can survive even under a 1-tonne truck. But watch out for that sexy cable.

I love external portable hard discs, love them to the extent that my office drawer is full of them. They range from the ones that I had assembled initially by buying a casing and a drive, to the ones I bought recently. But the moment I saw the Simple Tough from Hitachi, I sat back and said, this is a brilliant thing! 

The most brilliant part of this drive is that it comes with a built-in USB cable. I had to try it. So I copied about 200 GB of data on it, stashed it in my bag and flew to Bangalore. I made sure that the bag with the drive was treated badly—even dropped it a couple of times at the airport. The drive survived, and I had all my data. 

The drive has a single LED on top which is large enough to show you the power as well as read/write. The built-in cable gets tucked in and is supposedly the USP of the drive. Now you can never forget the cable. 

The downside is, its cable restricts how you can place the drive alongside the computer, and if it breaks the drive become useless.

That’s the only way you’ll lose the drive, because it is designed to withstand a 1-tonne truck driven over it. I tried to drive my car over it—the SimpleTough survived, as it did the 10 ft drop test. So, all you have to do is watch out for that cable. The hard disc can take care of itself. 

The drive comes with a three-year warranty, but damage to the cable is not covered. The device, though, is a bit ugly to look at. Sure no one will treat his hard disc like I treated it while testing, but if you have ever lost a hard disc because it was dropped accidentally, you know the value of this Simple Tough. But all this comes with a very high price tag.

Also, I did not like the fact that when USB 3.0 is becoming popular, it comes with a USB 2.0 interface. Bundled with this drive is Hitachi’s backup software called Hitachi Local Backup. For some reason, it works only with Windows while the drive itself can work with Mac and Linux—out of the box, without any need to install any drivers.

data storagehard discUSB