What is the most valuable thing for any photographer? Archive and data security. And it’s nice when you’re shooting in the studio and you can transfer all your photos to a desktop computer or straight to the cloud. And what if you are somewhere in the wilds, steppes or deserts, without a connection, and not in the best weather conditions?? What if there’s so much to shoot that you can’t bring enough thumb drives to accommodate them all?? And you have to do selection and processing right in the field. It’s not the camera you’re worried about or even yourself. You fear for the hard drive with your archive.
The hard drive is very fragile. A slight bump and you have a mess of ugly and broken files instead of the saved ones. And a travel photographer’s backpack is always subject to all kinds of dangers. I’ve had to lug equipment up into the mountains, backpack on horses, donkeys and even camels.
And these critters are not very careful with fragile equipment. And that’s all, often without the ability to leave the hard drive somewhere safe. I had to lug it around and get nervous. Until I got my hands on the LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt USB-C 5Tb hard drive.
LaCie, which belongs to Seagate, is known to the mass user first of all for its premium-class external hard drives and RAID-arrays of various sizes. And they’re what make perhaps the most interesting travel storage solution, the Rugged series drives.
Your first impression of the LaCie Rugged is that it’s significantly larger 34x90x90 .9×148.4 mm and in size 5 TB, a record size for this market . The drive looks stylish. A reminder – the entire Rugged Series was designed by Neil Poulton, who was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential designers of our time.
The drive’s silver box is wrapped in a soft rubber cover. The wire of the Thunderbolt connector tucks into a special slot in the rubber cover and hides under the sealed lid. The idea of putting a cable right into the drive might seem questionable – it can tear, it can be accidentally crushed or cut. But in all my travels, I was much more likely to forget the cable than to break or tear it. However, even if you do something wrong with the thunderbolt cable, under the same removable cover is a USB-C socket, as well as a status light for the drive.
Both connectors are moisture-proof, as is the entire hard drive, thanks to the sealed cover. The cover itself is not attached to the case in any way and could very well get lost. Perhaps that is why LaCie Rugged comes with a spare. It should be said that such a plug is a feature of Rugged hard drives with built-in Thunderbolt connector. In other versions the interface connectors remain open. A funny feature that most users are unlikely to notice. Under the rubber cover on the cable entry side is a small magnet that retracts the Thunderbolt connector into the slot.
The rubber boot isn’t a spacesuit, and it won’t keep LaCie Rugged from sinking. But it will protect from rain and dust. It also protects the disk from physical damage. But it is worth mentioning that dropping the drive will most likely kill it. But if the drive is disconnected and the reading heads are parked, the LaCie Rugged can survive a 1.5-meter drop.
The manufacturer even promises the drive will survive a drive-by-truck collision weighing as much as a ton. It will not look good after that the official website says so directly , but it should work. I did not run the hard drive over by car or horse during the test, but I was not afraid to leave it in a backpack loaded on a horse. I definitely stopped hiding the hard drive in a separate secure pocket and put it with all my other gear without worrying about it. Seems like a small thing, but it is one less thing to worry about and one more thing to distract you from the filming process.
The bright color of the shroud has another benefit. The piercing red hard drive is easy to spot on the ground and won’t get lost. This might be important for the traveling photographer.
Connecting and Installing
LaCie Rugged 5TB USB-C drive comes with an integrated Thunderbolt cord, plus a USB-C port and USB-C to USB 3 adapter.0. Immediately after plugging in, the drive is detected in the system and the LaCie Setup utility launches. The program will prompt to format the disk for your tasks.
Mac owners will be in for a little surprise – the program will offer a choice which part of the disk will be formatted in Fat 32, and which part in HFS+, the file system of MacOS X. And you can give any file system you want the whole disk. After formatting, the program asks you to register your disk and install some software including the backup program Intego Backup Assistant and copy the working documentation to the disk.
After installing it, the disk will be visible in the system. And so we can begin to test it. The manufacturer claims a read and write speed of 130 MB/s. Blackmagic Design DiskSpeed Test shows exactly this speed of reading and writing. In practice this means that a card with 64 GB of photos in RAW will be copied to the drive in about 15 minutes. At least at me during shooting this operation took so much time.
Conclusion
LaCie Rugged 5Tb is a fast, reliable hard drive capable of withstanding the rigors of a camping trip. The disk is reliably protected from shocks, moisture and dust, and its bright color helps it not to get lost in the grass. Given its very reasonable price at the time of writing the disk cost about 25000 Dollars and its huge storage capacity, the disk can be safely recommended to all traveling photographers and cameramen, for whom the bank of a mountain river, a forest clearing or desert dunes can suddenly become an office.
Is Fort Knox still the most secure location for storing important documents and artifacts?
Fort Knox is often considered one of the most secure locations for storing important documents and artifacts due to its high level of security measures. The United States Bullion Depository, commonly known as Fort Knox, is protected by armed guards, extensive surveillance systems, and layers of physical barriers. However, with advancements in technology and security systems, there may be other facilities that have surpassed Fort Knox in terms of security measures. While Fort Knox is still highly secure, it is difficult to definitively say if it is still the most secure location for storing important items.
What is the significance or importance of having a “Fort Knox” style security for the archive? Is there a particular reason or concern that necessitates such high-level protection?