Best External Harddrive

[NorCalLC]

I'm looking to pickup an external harddrive to carry on trips and install Overland Navigator software and maps on it. I like the idea of something rugged and portable but I have no experience with this setup. I'm thinking something in the range of 3-500 gigs should be plenty of space dedicated to navigation only.

Are the "rugged" harddrives worth the extra money, or is it generaly overkill? This looks intresting, maybe overkill though?

[ame="http://www.amazon.com/LaCie-All-Terrain-FireWire-Portable-301371/dp/B0018B5CA8/ref=dp_cp_ob_e_title_0"]http://www.amazon.com/LaCie-All-Terrain-FireWire-Portable-301371/dp/B0018B5CA8/ref=dp_cp_ob_e_title_0[/ame]

I'm also looking for the simplest plug n play design if possible, and something that will work well enough with an older laptop on XP.

 

[1leglance]

I have used both the rugged style like you linked to and normal usb ones..and I am stupid rough on my stuff with lots of desert dust around.
Honestly I have never had a harddrive fail and that includes running them 14hrs a day every day bouncing down washboard desert tracks.

Currently my practice is to save the money on the rugged ones and get a couple of smaller usb normal ones and duplicate vital info. This gives me more storage space and backup in case of issues.

Seems to work well so far.

 

[Pest]

If you want truly rugged, get a Solid State Disc (SSD). I'm not 100% certain, but I'd guess that 300-500GB is way overkill. I'd guess that a few 32GB SD cards would hold all you need (but not be the fastest performance).

 

[NorCalLC]

Thanks for the replies guys. I thought the "rugged" design might be overkill and I do like the mirrored drives in case one of them does crap out on me. I really don't do a lot of traveling yet, so I'm sure they would last me a long time.

The reason I mentioned 3-500 gigs is also to save pics and video along the way. I thought about flash drives, mem cards etc but I wasn't sure of the speed when pulling info from them. And Overland Nav maps take up 3-6 gigs of space per map, so that would be a few cards. No big deal either way I guess.