LaCie has been making Mac-centric products for a long time, though all of the LaCie drives we tested here work equally well with Macs and PCs. The two LaCie Rugged Hard Disks we tested differed only in their connectors: one was USB-only; the other one had USB, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800 ports. Aesthetically speaking, we really like the loud orange rubberized bumper around these drives—they would certainly help us worry less about clumsiness or the hard knocks of travel.

But this resilience to bumps comes at a price: LaCie’s Rugged drives are on the chunky side. The Rugged drives’ performance was unremarkable—they were neither the slowest nor the fastest. If you buy one of these drives, it’s for its rugged exterior rather than for the raw number of bits it can push and pull across the wire quickly.