LaCie’s Rugged drives have always been very popular with photographers; and just yesterday they announced the Rugged Thunderbolt drives in a 1TB SSD capacity. LaCie is claiming transfer speeds of 387MB/second thanks to the Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 connection–and further offering the potential to transfer 100GB in less than five minutes.
The New LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt can apparently be dropped from up to 6.6 feet and with the cap in place even offers protection against splashes and dust. When not in use, the cord can be neatly integrated into the case. It also includes LaCie Private-Public software, which lets users password-protect the entire drive or only certain volumes with AES 256-bit encryption.
The drives have a three year warranty and will retail for $949.99 when they hit retailers later this month. For an adventure photographer that’s often out in the field for a living, that sounds like a decent price that will obviously be written off on taxes but seems very high for the rest of us.