Freecom ToughDrive Sport

This pocket drive looks like some sort of gadget that you should use when mountain climbing, but in reality it's a toughened USB disk drive.

Type: USB
OS: Windows XP, Vista, 2000, 2003, Mac
Interface: USB 2.0
Storage range: 250,320,500GByte
Guide Price: £88/£100/£130 (250/320/500 GB)
Dimensions: 155(W) x 91(D) x 21(H) mm
Weight: 260 gm

There is no question that the way that the ToughDrive Sport looks is a gimmick. It looks like some sort of gadget that you should use to help climb a mountain and it comes with a karabiner hook of the sort mountain climbers use to connect something to a rope. In this instance it isn’t very clear what the hook is supposed to be used for – even if the USB cable looks like a climbing rope!

The whole point of the sporty image is to make the ToughDrive look tough but looks aren’t necessarily revealing. Freecom claims that the anti-shock mechanisms built into the drive allow it to survive a 2m fall onto a flat surface. Even so I don’t think clipping it onto the outside of a backpack, as per the advertising shots, is a particularly good idea!

Its built-in cable wraps around the outside of the case and the USB connector stows into a custom holder. This means that you don’t need to fumble looking for cables, just unwrap and plug in. It also means that you can’t use just any USB cable that happens to be available and if you want a longer connection you need an extension cable. On the plus side it comes with a built-in security chip that provides 256 bit MD5 encryption.

When the drive is first connected an application auto-starts from a partition that looks like a CD-ROM to the operating system. You then have to enter a password which is used from that point on to encrypt all files stored on the drive. There is no password recovery option and if you do lose the password then all of the data on the drive are lost. Your only option in this case is to reformat the drive. You can remove all password protection if the idea of losing data is more worrying than that same data falling into the wrong hands.

The file system used on the drive is FAT32 so as to provide the widest range of compatibility. You can re-partition and re-format the drive to use NTFS or HFS+ if you want or need to.

A separate auto-start file stored on the main partition opens an installer and offers to install other software pre-installed on the drive. You can select NTI Shadow, a backup program, or a Turbo USB 2.0 driver. The Turbo driver claims to increase speeds up to 40% but it only works under Windows. The backup program NTI Shadow is fairly sophisticated in that it can be use to take a scheduled or a “continuous” backup with the ability to keep multiple archive versions of a file. In addition you also get 30 and 90 day trial versions of NTI Ripper and Internet Security Suite respectively.

The look of the Freecom ToughDrive Sport may be a little gimmicky but if it appeals to you then the drive itself has a range of features that recommends it for serious use.

ToughDrive Sport product page

Freecom

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