The LaCie Rugged Mini is a speedy USB 3.0 drive that will shrug off a taxing daily commute in a clumsy student's backpack. But it's not ideal for a six-week Outward Bound adventure on the Ross Ice Shelf.

Speedy performance for a spinning drive; Some ruggedized protection; Decent price per gigabyte; Uses USB 3.0 interface.

Ruggedized casing is comparatively lightweight; Third-party online storage is pricey

The clear winner here is the Lacie Rugged Mini drive – both in looks, build quality, and function. ADATA makes clearly unsubstantiated claims, and the "rugged" aspect appears to be no more than superficial branding.

an unacceptable percentage of the minis simply stop working. One day, you plug in the device, and it just starts clicking. The information cannot be retrieved....poof. In one case, I put the information on two minis, because I always back things up in 2 or 3 spots...and both minis died.

When I had an old MacBook Pro, I had to transfer a lot of data from my hard drive to an external. USB 2.0 is fine, but I needed *anything* that was quicker. FireWire was the only choice I had, and with the secondary USB 3.0 port, this was good for looking into a future computer with faster transfer...

In property, it's location, location, location; in technology, especially when your business depends on it, the big thing is backup, backup, backup. As I always remind you (I like to prompt your memory backup, you see), it is impossible to be too paranoid when it comes to backup.

I transferred roughly 700gb of data to this within a few days of buying this drive. Since then, it's sat on a shelf until today when I needed to access the data. My computer can no longer access the drive citing "I/O Device Failure" My data has been lost and tech support aren't even capable of...

I purchased this drive in March of 2015 for my girlfriend, and it sat on her desk as served as storage for her videos and recorded music (she is a working musician). The drive worked without issue for several months, until this month (August 2015), when the drive refused to spin up.

Drive enclosure is metal, with a plastic caddy and a pretty good SATA->USB interface; Speeds were reasonable; Rubber bumper is well made and seems like it would serve it's purpose

I am giving this drive one star due to LaCie's choice of drive vendor, Seagate, in this case; Please read the "other thoughts" section for an explanation

Not the smallest drive I had, but certainly the toughest. The drive is very well built, and has excellent transfer speeds. The setup was a no-brainer, and the drive has been working like a charm for a bit more than a year now, and survived plenty of trips.

Rugged reliable. This is exactly what the doctor ordered for those of us who travel. It is protected from shocks. great size and speed. Took a very short period of time to back up my hard drive from my Air and was extremely robust. Good price point as well. Overall very satisfied!

This is a terrific little hard drive. I work from home, but also travel a lot and so I needed something that I can plug into my iMac in my studio, but also my MacBook when I am on the road - the rubber housing makes this EHD bullet proof!

Durable; Lightweight; Plug and play