What’s the right storage for a rugged notebook? It depends.
CRN recently conducted a Toughest Notebook Challenge. The tests were real-world, “I can’t believe I did that” abuses to notebooks from Acer, Panasonic, Toshiba and Dell. Acer and Panasonic came out on top.
These systems all used standard-class notebook disk drives, as best I can tell. Seagate’s entries in this space are the Momentus family of drives. Toughness for storage is either built in to the drive (like our EE25 drive for extreme environments) or built around it with cases, absorbers, etc.
Which method is best for you depends upon what the notebook is meant to do. Using a standard drive frees you to offer value-add features like flash-infused hybrid technology, secure Full Disk Encryption and drop-safe Zero-G Sensor technology. Capacity will always be the highest here as well.
Rugged drives are the right solution when the application is really funky, or when the chassis-related costs of protecting a regular drive exceed the incremental cost of the rugged drive.
And do some real-world testing before you claim you’re tough enough!
Best part is that these are probably not the brands that most people would choose for a rugged laptop.