CES 2012: ioSafe Thunderbolt Drive Shrugs Off Damage From Its Namesake [ioSafe Thunderbolt Drive Endures Million-Volt Barrage From A Tesla Coil In Demonstration Of Its Durability]

Posted on TFTS by Steve Anderson on Friday, 13. January 2012 under: Computers & Computing, Hard Disks & Solid State Drives

You’ve got to hand it to the crew at ioSafe for knowing how to put on a show. That and showing off just how durable their external drives are; last year, they sent a swarm of tech journalists armed with shotguns and assault rifles into the ring with their Rugged Portable drive, and this year, for the Thunderbolt drive, they took things one step up by subjecting the metaphorical Thunderbolt drive to literal thunderbolts. Specifically, those generated by a million-volt Tesla coil.

A Tesla coil, for those not familiar with the legendary inventor, basically serves as a transformer that can deal in high voltages. While it was used commercially for a while back in the 1920s in various devices, it and its ilk lost ground to alternating current devices, and today it’s primarily used as a way to throw lightning bolts around. And that’s exactly what it was used for in this demonstration, when ioSafe subjected its Thunderbolt drive to substantial amounts of high-voltage current from a Tesla coil.

Interestingly, the drive only somewhat survived–the drive only survives the testing two times out of three–and this was one of the ones where it didn’t. However, once the CEO got involved, and pulled the storage part out of the drive, and snapped it in a new casing, the drive fired right back up to life as though nothing had happened. Apparently only the controller board had been taken out by the demonstration; the contents of the solid state drive had survived unharmed.

It’s an impressive demonstration, sure enough, as I don’t think anyone’s going to use their Thunderbolt drive as a lightning rod, but it likely will survive a bit of a blast from a power surge in normal use pretty well. That makes this one a pretty good alternative if you want to protect your data as well as most anyone can.

There’s no word on when the solid state drive version will be released, or how much it will cost when it’s released, but you can already pick up the Rugged Portable hard drive version from a variety of places for prices varying with storage size.

So what do you guys think here? Want an external Thunderbolt drive that can go toe to toe with a Tesla coil and keep your data safe? Or are you okay with lower protection and possibly better storage? No matter what you think, head on down to the comments section and fill us in!