I just picked up another LaCie Rugged drive for an upcoming trip to New Zealand so I thought I’d take a second to post about them.  The Rugged line of drives from LaCie are designed with the traveling photographer in mind and are encased in a protective rubber shell.  I have been using a 120gb Rugged for about 2 years now and it has been faultless so far.  If you take a look at the larger version of the photo on the left you will even see a sizable dent in the case on the top but still it keeps on ticking.  Inside the casing , the 2.5 inch Samsung drive is “suspended” on rubber mounting points for added vibration and shock resistance.

The 120gb drive I have is only USB 2.O but I have just ordered a 500gb firewire drive.  The firewire drives come with both firewire 400 and 800 as well as USB2.0.  They can also be daisychained together with other firewire drives.  This time I needed to get the added size of 500gb to handle the huge files from the Canon 5dMKII.

It’s important to travel with enough storage to keep a redundant backup of your photos.  One copy of the

photos I shoot will be kept on the hard drive of my Macbook Pro, the second copy will be on the new 500gb Rugged drive and my old 120gb Rugged has been relegated to storing my movie and music collection on my travels.  If you are storing shots in a similar configuration, remember to NOT keep your portable drive in your laptop bag!!!  If you laptop bag gets stolen you will lose both copies of your files!! Be sure to keep them in separate locations, with these Rugged drives you could just put it in your pocket.

I tend to keep mine in a small bag inside my camera bag.  I found a small bag by Think Tank Photo called 

the ” All the other stuff” that works just great (see photo) .  The rear pocket will fit your rugged drive, the center pocket will hold a second drive, a portable mouse and a card reader while the front pocket can hold all your cables.