LaCie has been around for a long time - mainly appealing to Mac owners who are prepared to pay extra for stylish enclosures that match their hardware. The LaCie Rugged brings together an aluminium enclosure and bright orange protective surround that offers physical protection for your data as well as the offer of data protection services.

While cloud storage has put a huge dent in the need for small storage devices to act as a kind of sneaker-net, there's still a place for external storage devices. When it comes to remote backups or moving large volumes of data, external hard drives are still very useful. With portable hard drives, reliability and performance are of paramount concern. That's why I've been looking forward to testing the Western Digital My Passport SSD and LaCie Rugged USB-C drives out.

Seagate has announced enhanced versions of two flash technologies; the Nytro 5000 M.2 non-volatile memory express (NVMe) SSD and the Nytro 3000 Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) SSD. The Nytro 5000 NVMe M.2 SSD and Nytro 3000 SAS SSD offer 2TB of capacity and random write performance levels as high as 67,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) — double the performance levels of the previous version.

You may remember some talk of helium-filled hard drives a few years back, but like a lot of new technologies, it's taken time to get the manufacturing processes into line to ship the hardware in bulk.