Say you need portable storage with a hard drive’s capacity. It has to survive the vibration of a helicopter (which gives most hard drives dementia), not to mention the occasional fumble on concrete or rocks. Your budget? Substantial .. . but subject to oversight.
At Fortress CEO Duncan Mackay’s insistence, I dropped this 40GB drive with positively ancient specs on a concrete floor. On its corner. From 7 feet up. It not only lived but also developed no bad sectors. I couldn’t even tell which corner the drive had landed on, as its electroless nickel plating wasn’t even abraded. Unfortunately, Mackay was unable to provide shock tolerance figures for anything but the bare drive itself, although the assembled unit does surpass the military’s MIL-STD-810F standard “by a factor of three.”
Fortress CNC-machines its enclosures out of billet aluminum, fills them with a proprietary, viscoelastic material a “solid that acts like a liquid” and then installs notebook drives encased in heat-wicking aluminum cradles.
The FXHDD2540 Fortress sent me had a 40GB ATA-100 Fujitsu MHV2040AT drive inside. Oddly, its FireWire link proved write-challenged, and its USB interface couldn’t reed good.
To reduce heat buildup, Fortress uses low-rpm drives. In fact, its entire $499 to $949 range tops out at 5,400rpm drives with 8MB caches. Mackay says a 160GB model and eSATA are in the works. A SSD (solid-state disk) could be made even tougher (and faster), but only at double the price or more. Corsair’s rugged Flash Voyagers cost just $140 online, but top out at 16GB. Hence Fortress’ niche.


