That’s an impressive lifespan for an external hard drive. OWC’s One-The-Go clear plastic drives have been conversation pieces and workhorses for eleven years. USB 2 is a slow mule, and USB 3 can be a racehorse in comparison. If you currently don’t have a USB 3 Mac, soon you will. I recently had a problem with my CooKey, and the company’s phone support rep solved it in two minutes. Professional techies and road warriors will purchase several Rugged Keys, due to their versatility and LaCie’s reliability. I know the latter isn’t logical or predictable, compared to the newer Retina Display laptop, but I am very pleased with the performance of Rugged Key with my workhorse MacBook Pro. Onto my 2010 MacBook Pro, with a user-installed SSD internal drive from OWC, the USB 2 iTunes folder transfer whizzed by in only 140 seconds. Comparable CooKey read speeds were up to 16 MB/second, and the write speeds were up to 13 MB/second. The previous winner, LaCie’s CooKey USB 2 LINK, required 505 seconds for the same transfer.Īctivity Monitor’s read speeds for Rugged Key were up to 80 MB/second, and the write speeds were up to 42 MB/second, although most of the time the speed was much lower.
On a new Retina Display MacBook Pro with 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 processor and 8 GB memory, Rugged Key copied a combination of 305 iTunes songs and movies totaling 4.3 GB in 380 seconds.
Its USB 3 data transfer rate is quick and efficient. A robust key ring allows you to attach Rugged Key just about anywhere. Snug friction keeps the key firmly in place within its rubbery cocoon. Encased in its peculiar, columnar orange sheath, Rugged Key is easy to find in your cluttered backpack, and difficult to lose on your messy desk. It is resistant to heat, cold, water, and being dropped.
LaCie’s Rugged Key portable flash drive is the most unusual product in this discussion. These three companies currently offer external storage that MyMac is pleased to evaluate and recommend year after year. You think company warranty periods are too short, but you typically use their products beyond the guaranteed number of years.Įnter Center Stage: LaCie, Seagate, and Other World Computing, or OWC. You always need more external storage than you think you need, and you always want faster transfer speeds than you have. A few reliable companies dominate the market for external storage. Portable external drives can cost more per gigabyte than do stationary desktop units, but drive prices in general continue their astonishing descent from the days of not very yore. Prices are all over the place, as are design and drive case size. USB 2 is still here, as is FireWire 800, and so now are USB 3 and Thunderbolt. Bus-powered external portable drives of different sizes, speeds, and capacities will be around for a while longer. The more things stay the same, the more they change.
Seagate Backup Plus Portable External 1TB Drive for MacĪdapters are available, sold separately, to convert this drive to FireWire 800 and/or Thunderbolt OWC On-The-Go Pro 500GB Triple Interface External Drive OWC On-The-Go Pro 240GB SSD Triple Interface External Drive