ioSafe puts Thunderbolt drive to lightning test (hands-on and video)

External storage company ioSafe likes to put on a show at CES. Last year, it demonstrated its ultratough Rugged Portable hard drives by unleashing journalists with shotguns and assault rifles on them. This year, it decided to test its Thunderbolt-compatible prototype’s shockproofing instead — by bringing in Tesla coil enthusiast Austin Richards, also known as Dr. MegaVolt.

After shocking the drive multiple times with Richards’ million-volt coil, ioSafe plugged it in. A snap-on metal cover is supposed to protect the drive’s inputs, but the Tesla coil has apparently still overloaded it in about a third of the demos; unfortunately, this was one of those times. The controller board had been fried, so we got a view of the dual RAID 1 solid-state drives inside while the CEO performed some recovery. Once a new board had been plugged in, the drive mounted and we found the text file we’d made beforehand unharmed. Of course, ioSafe isn’t suggesting you take your hard drive into a thunderstorm, but for sheer showmanship, the demo’s difficult to beat.