Waterproof and Fireproof Your Data: ioSafe Solo Hard Drive Review

Indestructible is a powerful word.  More accurate is “waterproof,” “fireproof,” and “mostly crush proof,” as a way to describe this ioSafe Solo 500 GB hard drive. If you’re looking for a smart way to protect your data locally, this may be the hardware for you.

All the fun videos of reviewers like me showed they had a lot of fun trying to destroy this drive, but I couldn’t bring myself to conduct those tests.  We wanted to give this hard drive away when we were done and driving over it with an excavator or dragging it behind my pickup truck wouldn’t make for a very nice prize. So we link to the funny videos below.

You can see a standard external 500 GB hard drive next to it to get an idea of size. The one of the left weighs at most two pounds.  I used this ioSafe drive for a couple of months before restoring it to factory settings.  In fact, in the Pinnacle Studio 14 video editing review, I used this hard drive to store a bunch of the video tests while running it from a Lenovo A70z all-in-one computer and from the A63 tower unit that we gave away last month.

Besides looking really impressive and tough sitting on my office desk, with shiny neon blue lights on the front panel, it operates very quietly and is quite fast. I couldn’t tell much difference between my internal hard drive and this external bulldog in terms of speed to access a file.

What I like about it:

• 5 year warranty, 5 year digital recovery services (DRS), 500GB is $249.98.  You can reduce the warranty and DRS and get 500GB for as low as $149.98, but why?  The whole reason you buy this drive is so that you have sleep-at-night-peace that if your competitor drives over your hard drive with a backhoe, you can get your Quickbooks file out in one piece.

You can also get internal hard drives from ioSafe and network storage – all disaster proof.  Despite all the funny tests, what this company really does is make an amazing enclosure case for hard drives so you can protect your data. Then they back up their claims with lots of fun tests and further reinforce that with data recovery experts standing by should you have a catastrophe. Definitely worth a look.  They look cool sitting on the desk, too

• Quiet and attractive.

• Bolt hole on the steel plate to make it hard to steal.  I had a laptop stolen once and so this small feature to make it harder for someone to steal made me happy.

What I didn’t like:

• It weighs 15 pounds and my office is on the second floor.

Learn more about the ioSafe Solo hard drive.

Watch funny videos about how other bloggers tried to destroy the ioSafe Solo.

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