CalDigit’s Tuff line of rugged USB-C external drives have been a great option for those looking to take extra storage or backups on the go for a while now, but in addition to the existing 2 TB model using a 5400 rpm spinning hard drive, the company recently expanded the line to include a 1 TB solid-state drive option.
At a list price of $499, the solid-state drive version is not cheap, but if you want fast storage on the go, combining an SSD with the Tuff’s 10 Gbps USB 3.1 Gen 2 support gives some of Apple’s latest Macs the ability to move data quickly. The MacBook Pro and brand-new iMac with their Thunderbolt 3 ports supporting full 10 Gbps USB are the best partners for the Tuff, and it’s easy to see how useful it would be for moving data back and forth between notebook and desktop machines.
As a portable drive, the Tuff is bus-powered, which means it draws all of the power it needs from the host computer over USB and doesn’t need to be plugged into power separately. The Tuff arrives pre-formatted in Journaled HFS+ to work with macOS, and CalDigit provides easy step-by-step instructions for re-formatting the drive for Windows if necessary.
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