Product: ATP ToughDrive 8GB
Manufacturer: ATP
MSRP: ~$40.00-$50.00
Author: aliencam (Cameron Kopas)

ATP’s ToughDrive combines the utility of a regular USB Flash Drive with the durability of a rock. The drive claims to be rugged, waterproof, resistant to extreme, temperature, and shock proof. But in today’s world of Internet reviews and commentary, you can’t just slap a picture of a tank on the package and get away with it unless you have a serious product to offer.

Packaging and Physical Description

The package that the ToughDrive comes in is once again, one of those annoying blister packs. If you read my review on the EarthDrive you would know a fraction of my distaste for these. Not only is it a regular blister pack, but it tricks you into believing that the package can be easily snapped open and closed, until you go to pull it apart with your bare hands; the whole situation ends up with nothing less than a very frustrated person holding a sharp cutting implement, which is just bad for everybody. The package is however, almost fitting for the product, virtually invincible, and tough to open.

The drive is completely encased in a rubber shell, with a matching rubber cap. There is a light exposed, and a hole for a clasp in the back. The models available are a camo model and an all-black model, personally I prefer the black one for its uniformity. The clasp seems to be made of aluminum, and is shaped like a carabiner clip. The clasp is very light, but at the same time quite strong. I did not have any problems with it, and I even left the clip on through the destructive mayhem that occurred. The USB interface of the drive is also slightly reinforced, to help prevent damage to the interface. Unfortunately though, in order to meet USB specifications, and allow the drive to fit in all USB ports, the top of the interface is still vulnerable to being bent in. This can be easily fixed with a screwdriver or something similar though, and after that repair the only downside I found was that it was a little tight when inserting or removing the drive from a USB port. The clip is on the drive side, meaning that you are unlikely to loose your actual flash drive and data, but since the cap does not fit on with anything except friction, there is a chance you could loose the cap to the ToughDrive.

The drive is completely enclosed, which allows it to be dustproof, and waterproof. It likely would use a completely integrated chip, similar to the “coin-sized flash drives” or something similar to the insides of the ATP EarthDrive. The blue light on the drive is very very bright, and actually bothers me when using it on my laptop. I was able to get around this by covering up the light with the cap. When doing this, I noticed what may be a weak spot in the drive. The blue light from the LED shines through the back of the drive, into the hole where the clip should attach. I cannot tell if this is purposeful, or if it is a sign of the rubber being very thin in that area.

Benchmark

Using Flash Memory Toolkit [LINK] the ATP ToughDrive clocked in at 6.3664MB/s write, and 26.0798 MB/s read.

I also performed a real-situation test in which I moved a folder filled with almost 4 GB of files onto the flash drive using rsync. These test results gave 2.15MB/s write speed over almost 4 gigs. (2253166.34 bytes / sec = 2.14878687 MB / sec).

Other Information

The drive comes with utilities for partitioning the drive, and for password protecting/encrypting files on it.  One thing I am  glad for regarding these is that while the programs are available, they do not try to autorun when inserting the drive, so yo don’t have to worry about annoying software dialogs when you just want to transfer some files even on computers that have autorun enabled.
I was easily able to get a persistent Linux installation running on this drive. I used the Ubuntu USB Startup Disk utility in order to do this, and I tested out booting from the USB drive on many different computers, all of which worked flawlessly. I reformatted the drive multiple drives, and moved data around along with the bootable linux.

Mayhem

Unfortunately, I was unable to take apart the ToughDrive because of its solid external casing. The only way I can see to get it open would be to cut off the rubber to expose the rest of the drive, but I was not able to do that because it probably wouldn’t go back together very well (the rubber shell seems to be a thermoset polycarbonate, which would burn instead of melting back together if I tried). However, I was able to test out the “tough” part of the ToughDrive as part of the review.

The drive easily stood up to being dropped, thrown, and walked on. It also was able to withstand being ridden over by a bicycle.
And while there have been videos of the ToughDrive being run over by a car and surviving, it was able to stand up to being run over by a school bus.

I wanted to test it next on a light rail and then a train, but from what I know about the drive, and the fact that it did not survive a hammer blow in another review video, it likely would not survive either of the two.

In order to test the waterproof properties and the temperature resistance in one step, I boiled the ToughDrive in water on the stove for a few minutes.  The video does not show the entire time, but just me showing the experiment in a quick video.  I wanted to make sure to keep siring the flash drive around to prevent my pot from being ruined.

Pros

• Very Rugged
• Supports a Bootable Linux Environment
• Slick all-Black exterior

Cons

• Light is too Bright
• Cap may be Lost

Conclusion

I’ll just cut right to the chase here, this thing is physically solid, it should be able to withstand anything that would accidentally happen to it. If you are looking for a flash drive to carry with you everywhere, and are even a little worried about it being damaged, I would definitely recommend getting an ATP ToughDrive.

Tags: ATP, Drive, Flash, Review, Rugged, Tough, ToughDrive, USB