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Jul 01, 2025

Get a Deal on This Backup Drive You Could Kick Out a Window

We independently evaluate all of our recommendations. When you buy through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more here. Dust-, water-, and impact- resistant. Say no more. Whether

We independently evaluate all of our recommendations. When you buy through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more here.

Dust-, water-, and impact- resistant. Say no more. Whether you’ve got a hostile working environment or just clumsy hands, a ruggedized external drive could mean peace of mind.

By Matt Jancer

Rugged storage drives aren’t just straight-shootin’, truck-drivin’ aficionados of flannels and outlaw country. They may be into one or all of these things, but they’re also more. They’re storage drives that can survive bangs, blows, your way too dusty desk, and a bit of water, too.

If you regularly bring an external drive of files and photos around town and want the extra protection, or if you just want to make extra sure your digital life is as safe as can be from water splashes and clumsy hands, let me introduce the X10 rugged external SSD from Crucial, one of the major names in SSDs.

And remember folks, if you aren’t backing up your files regularly on at least one external drive (preferably two), then you’re living an inch from disaster.

The X10’s IP65 rating means it’s guarded against dust and splashes of water, although it’s not rated for submersion in water. You can also drop it from a height of three meters (about 9.8 feet) without worry about it jostling all the insides and blowing your data to smithereens.

Most SSDs are more fragile than that, even if they in turn are not as fragile as the technology they’ve largely replaced for most people’s day to day use.

SSD stands for solid state drive, and it’s a faster, more compact, more bump resistant alternative that’s supplanted HDDs (hard drive disks, known casually as simply hard drives) in most applications for which truly monumental amounts of storage aren’t needed.

Per gigabyte, hard drives are a lot cheaper. But they’re also more fragile, since the spinning platter inside, on which data is stored, means a lot of moving parts compared to an SSD. Not that there aren’t ruggedized hard drives that guard against bumps, dust, and water, but I’m teeing up the case that if you want secure portability, starting your search with an SSD is the way to go.

Two terabytes is enough room for the compact Crucial X10 to hold an entire system backup of the average person’s entire laptop. It’ll work just as well for automated Time Machine or multiple manual backups of files and even occasional offloads of photos from your phone.

Only people who work with large amounts of RAW photographs and images will have to consider larger drives, although there are larger versions of the Crucial X10 for sale, such as the 6TB for $292.

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