Fresh from their colourful 'Bricks' series of hard drives, LaCie has released a new 'rugged' external storage drive, cased in aluminum and protected by a rather bright orange rubberized coating.

Triple interface; no power required

Small drop distance; No protection for rear ports

The Good Strong, tough build. Wide range of capacities available. True plug and play, including USB 1.1. Bus-powered. Support for Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X.

Strong, tough build; Wide range of capacities available; True plug and play, including USB 1.1; Bus-powered; Support for Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X

Large price gap between USB and FireWire models; No Activity light

Durable; Good Value; High Quality

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The LaCie Rugged All-Terrain External 250 hard-drive is a portable storage device which will allow you to store 250gb of multimedia files such as pictures, music and video. You will obviously also be able to hold documents and other files as well (e.g. software installations).

Fast transfer speed; protection from knocks and drops

Fairly high price

Keeping your valuable data safe from some nasty computer spasm that wipes it back to a line of useless noughts is very sensible. And if you're going to back up, you may as well do it with a hard-drive that can survive an apocalyptic nuclear blast.

LaCie's Rugged Hard Disk gets its name from its rigid metal case and the thick orange rubber bumper that surrounds it. Although we wouldn't want to drop any hard disk, the Rugged feels more robust than many disks.

I absolutely LOVE this drive. I use it with my MacBook as my backup drive, as well as for my Aperture, iPhoto, and iTunes libraries so that I can keep my local hard drive free and clear. It's completely USB powered with no need for additional power supply, making this drive VERY portable.

Easy To Setup; Easy to use; High Capacity; Portable; Quiet; USB Powered

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World-renowned designer, Neil Poulton, is at the centre of this superb creation that offers the user a fantastic portable storage solution. It comes with a high-speed USB 2.0 interface connection that's bus powered and plug-and-play compatibility for both PC and Mac users.

This is hardly the first time that we're meeting Huawei products for the pages of our website, but these were mostly manufactured by other companies and merely signed by Huawei. After the Ideos 7 Slim... We first saw the famed iPad back in 2010, when it debuted at Apple retail stores.

The name of the Lacie Rugged immediately gives you a good indication of the aim of this eye-catching external hard drive. Lacie has opted for a robust plastic box that cradles the hard drive inside, and will absorb any shocks and knocks should you drop it.