Ever since I lost a whole holiday’s worth of travel pictures, because I accidentally dropped my fashionable and fancy portable harddrive, I have started to appreciate qualities such as shock-resistancy over design.
For the PortraitsOfAsia.be project, I took along a Freecom ToughDrive Custom, which, as the name suggests, a shock-resistant portable drive of 320 GB. A nice added bonus is that the Freecom drives are not only tough, but they’re well-designed as well. The USB Cable nicely fits into the drive, and the Custom version even allows you to put your favorite picture under it’s transparent shield . There’s also a ‘normal’ version, a ‘Pro’ version, which boasts USB as well as FireWire, and even a version with a leather cover.
When I was in Singapore (click here for my completely unbiased impressions about the city – in Dutch, sorry guys) I saw Freecoms latest addition to their range of shock-resistant harddrives: the ToughDrive Sport. I was happy to notice that the Sport version (which is also available in 500 GB) deals with the only complaint I had about the original ToughDrive: the cable is very short (there isn’t really any, actually), which means that if you take the laptop on your lap, or are lying in bed with it, the drive is ‘dangling’ at the side of your computer.
The ToughDrive Sport has a ‘real’ cable of about 30 cm, that you can nicely wrap around the drive when you’re not using it. The design also features a big O-ring, so you can even clip the disk with the supplied karabiner (mousqueton) to your belt (although I’m not sure why you’d want to do that…)
The ToughDrive has a nicely finished, non-scratching, rubber-like exterior. Since Singapore is all about spending money, I thought I’d honour the city by buying one 
By the way, don’t be put off by the prices you see on Freecom’s own e-commerce site. As usual, you can get a much better deal by shopping around on the internet: you might find outlets that are up to 50% cheaper, depending on where you live.
P.S. ToughDrives are designed to take a fall from up to one meter on a flat surface. This means that in real life, you’ll have a better chance of your disk surviving a drop than a non-shockresistant drive, but you should still backup your pictures to at least one other medium!
