If you need the fastest rugged portable storage, the LaCie Rugged USB 3.0 Thunderbolt ($199.99 list) is the external drive you want. This solid-state drive (SSD) is made for a Mac, but is strong enough for a PC, especially now that Thunderbolt is available on Windows laptops. Solid-state drives are a little pricey on a GB-per-dollar basis, but the LaCie drive totally makes up for it in speed and flexibility, earning it our Editors' Choice nod for rugged, portable drives. If you are a speed demon with a Thunderbolt-equipped Mac or PC, this drive should be in your commute bag.

Design and Features
The Rugged USB 3.0 Thunderbolt is similar in size and design to the LaCie Rugged Mini (500GB) ($114.99 list, 3.5 stars)SEE IT we looked at last year, down to the pocket-sized metal and plastic enclosure wrapped in a protective orange rubber bumper. Put side by side, you'd need to look at the interface ports or the label to tell them apart. The last Rugged Mini sported a spinning 500GB hard drive, while the Thunderbolt drive contains a 120GB SSD. This puts it in the same class as the Editor's Choice ioSafe Rugged Portable SSD (120GB) ($499 list, 4.5 stars)].

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LaCie rates the drive to survive a four-foot drop, but since this is a SSD with no moving parts, we're sure it will survive an even higher drop. With no moving parts, the drive will work fine even in a high vibration/movement environment, like in the back of an off-road vehicle ambling down a steep, rock strewn dirt road. Unlike a spinning drive, I wouldn't worry about using the LaCie drive actively while in that truck. With a spinning drive, you're going to worry about every pothole and rut causing the drive head to skip and damage your data. The drive comes with both a USB 3.0 cable and a Thunderbolt cable, which will save you the $49 purchase price of the Apple-branded Thunderbolt cable. Both cables are in the 1.5- to 2-foot range, much shorter than the six-foot long Apple cable. The length is more convenient for the commuter or business traveler who is carting around a laptop like a MacBook Air.

The Rugged USB 3.0 Thunderbolt drive has no other accessories, but the drive doesn't really need any extras. The drive is ready for Time Machine backup right after a quick setup session. The drive first brings up a small partition when you plug it into your Mac, which prompts you to run a LaCie setup program. The setup program will format the drive, with one or two partitions for Mac and PC compatible formatting. You're prompted to size the partition, anywhere from fully Mac, to 50/50 Mac and PC, to fully PC compatible. The first partition (called "LaCie") is formatted HFS+ for efficient use on any Mac running OS X. The second partition (Called "LaCie Share") is formatted FAT32, and can be used by both PCs and Macs. The setup program keeps a copy of itself on the LaCie Share drive, just in case you want to repartition the drive in the future. A 50/50 split is the most flexible, but that of course means that your drive is effectively separated into two 60GB volumes. If you have no need for PC file transfer, then I suggest making the drive a 120GB HFS+ volume for the Mac.

The LaCie Setup program will prompt you to install a few optional utilities, including Intego Backup Assistant (a basic timed backup program), LaCie Private Public (a 256-bit AES encryption program), the drive documentation (in PDF format) and a Wuala cloud storage. All LaCie hard drives come with 10GB of Wuala cloud storage for a year. After the year is up or anytime during that year, you can upgrade cloud storage depending on how much storage you need. For example, 100GB is going for $11.99 per month these days.

Performance
The Rugged USB 3.0 Thunderbolt is one of the fastest single mechanism drives we've tested. It was able to return a 4,344 point score on the PCMark7 HDD test, which outpaces the 3,946 point score that the ioSafe SSD got late last year. Both drives were tested using USB 3.0 on our Windows 7 PC testbed. Both are much faster than the 1,449 point score we got on our current EC for spinning hard drives, the Seagate Backup Plus ($139.99 list, 4.5 stars).

Mac testing reinforced the LaCie's speed edge over rivals. The drive took only 17 seconds to finish our 1.2GB drag-and-drop test on Thunderbolt and an equally quick 20 seconds on USB 3.0. Contrast this with the Western Digital My Passport Studio (1TB) ($179.99 list, 4 stars)SEE IT, which took 19 seconds using the FireWire800 interface and 40 seconds with USB 2.0 (The My Passport Studio we tested doesn't support USB 3.0).

Where the LaCie drive really shines is throughput. It returned an insane 432 MB/sec read and 191.5 MB/sec write throughput via USB 3.0 on our AJA system test, which tests the drives' throughput on video operations. The LaCie returned similar numbers on the Thunderbolt interface (379 MB/sec read, 200 MB/sec write), showing that the SSD is the speed demon in the equation. These numbers are close to LaCie's Little Big Disk Thunderbolt (240GB SSD) ($899.99 list, 4 stars) (476 MB/sec read, 252 MB/sec write), our previous recommendation for a transportable, SSD-based Thunderbolt drive.

The closest pocket-sized rival to the LaCie Rugged is the Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt Portable HDD (HD-PA1.0TU3) ($229.99 list, 4 stars), which uses a 1TB spinning hard drive. As a result, the Buffalo MiniStation is quite a bit slower on read and write operations (110 MBps read, 96 MBps write). That's three times faster than the WD My Passport under USB 2.0, but still slower than the SSD-equipped drives.

So here's the dilemma: What portable drive is best for you? The LaCie Rugged USB 3.0 Thunderbolt is a speedy drive that is both more portable and a lot less expensive than the Thunderbolt drives that came out earlier this year, like the LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt and the Promise Pegasus R6 ($1,999 list, 3.5 stars). The LaCie Rugged fully takes advantage of the speedier USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt interfaces as well. The Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt beats the LaCie Rugged on the dollar per GB basis, but not the speed. The LaCie Rugged goes for $1.667 per GB, which is passable for a speedy SSD. Contrast this with the Buffalo Thunderbolt Drive, which shows the spinning hard drive's economy of scale at $0.239 per GB. As they say, you'll always pay to get things done quicker. The closest competitor in functionality, capacity, and price is the former Editor's Choice for rugged portable hard drives, the ioSafeRugged Portable SSD. Both the ioSafe and the LaCie have a 120GB capacity, and both are ruggedized. The ioSafe is undoubtedly still the choice for the user that will need to use the drive in an extreme environment like on a safari in the Congo or an Arctic expedition to the Yukon. However, for regular 9-to-5 commuters that aren't gentle with their equipment, the LaCie is a much more affordable, and is faster too. Thanks to those factors, we crown the LaCie Rugged USB 3.0 Thunderbolt as our new Editors' Choice for rugged portable hard drives.

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the LaCie Rugged USB 3.0 Thunderbolt with several other hard drive side by side.