Freecom ToughDrive Review

The ToughDrive is a drive that is specifically designed to resist the wear and tear of being carried about, with capacities ranging from 250GB all the way to a staggering 640GB you can be certain that you’ll never run out of storage.

So the question about this disk is how well it actually performs after some tumbles, or if it actually works? The plain grey plastic and silicon casing isn’t the most attractive out there, and you aren’t provided with a choice of colours, nonetheless it has been replaced by the translucent rubber case with allowed for “customizable” designs, which quite frankly didn’t look the part.

Performance isn’t the major selling factor of the Freecom, coming with a standard 5,400 RPM drive and USB 2.0, nevertheless it does pack some punch. With Freecom providing a Turbo Boost Driver (Windows only), you certainly see a speed bump compared to the high majority of the portable drives out there, with a 1GB movie file being copied in around 30 seconds.

Coming in at 200 grams and only 19mm thick, this is certainly portable. Despite that, I have become a little unsure about the silicone sleeve that simple slips over the hard drive. Over time I feel this may become loose and the overall integrity of the drive will be compromised. This may be a turn off for some.

To ensure that all your data on the drive is kept secure, Freecom has protected it with 256bit MD5 hardware password protection. So entering the correct password is the only way to access the files on the drive. This even means if the disk has been taken out from the case, your files will still be protected.